Middle Eastern Belongings [Hardcover]

This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with ones deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized.

All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of anguished cultural projects. All use metaphor: national territory as woman, national resolve as cactus, and so on. None is reductionistic; belonging is rendered in its complexity, with its agonies as well as its joys. All could be identified with a growing genre of work on belonging. At the heart of each are the bonds that comprise belonging. Each one conveys both belongings messiness and its joys, and touches as much as it argues and elaborates.

This book was published as a special issue of Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power.

Diane E. King (University of Kentucky), Middle Eastern Belongings: Impositions, Ironies, Bodies, Lands (Introductory article)

Sarah Smiles Persinger (Independent Scholar), On the Margins: Women, National Boundaries, and Conflict in Saddam's Iraq

Samar Kanafani (American University of Beirut), Leaving Mother-Land: The Anti-Feminine in Fida'i Narratives

Diane E. King (University of Kentucky), The Personal is Patrilineal: Namus as Sovereignty

Nasser Abufarha (University of WisconsinMadison), Land of Symbols: Cactus, Poppies, Orange and Olive Trees in Palestine

Gabriele vom Bruck,   Naturalising, Neutralising Women's Bodies: The 'Headscarf Affair' and the Politics of Representation

Vlóí