Nèdeem Elmahjoub's blog

A two-part essay from 2018 Secularists, Secularism and the Syrian Uprising Part 1 Part 2

“From Iran to Turkey, from Egypt to Iraq, they kept writing, kept challenging, refusing to be erased .” Related Women and gender

[T]he rejection of state-centric nationalism, while desirable, could leave a discursive space that sectarian or despotic groups could occupy. This explains why supra-nationalist and infra-nationalist groups with Islamic, tribal, and ethnic identities dominate the scene. Due to these competing identities, which are functioning at the local and trans-local levels, popular nationalism is facing a major challenge as it attempts to counter state nationalism. Popular nationalism could be overtaken by other competing ideologies. Most opposition leaders are detached from people’s everyday realities. They are mostly busy producing centralized and exclusive narratives that are in many ways a replica of the regime’s ideology.] Noticeable from the start though, in the early period of popular nationalism women were mostly invisible in street activities although a few took part in the beginning of the revolution. During the toppling of the Assad regime by the leading force of HTS, women were hardly ...

  A policeman measures the distance between a woman's knee and the bottom of her bathing suit. Washington DC, 1922. Library of Congress, USA. Think of France banning burkini and the headscarf, for example. 

An excerpt from a new book    Global Middle East - Into the Twenty-First Century

The man who called black people “coons, referred to Muslim women as “letterboxes” and “bank robbers”, Jews as “stingy” and women as “hot totty”, demands politics be “civil and kind.”

Gender and Empire Essential readings

From the first half of the 20th century in Egypt Collecting Cairo's Discarded Images

Egyptian Novelist Salwa Bakr dares to say it aloud on revolution's successes and failures

Sex Power Violence #MeToo A verso free ebook

"... Look at  Moonlight  — it’s about being stigmatised, being gay and black and poor. Fassbinder was always interested in the lives of outsiders and immigrants from the very beginning. He showed how we are all under the tyranny of values that are not even our own.” The muse and the monster: Fassbinder's favourite star on surviving his abuse

" The essay seems to vacillate between the urge to expose the hypocrisy or mendacity of power in its use of humanitarianism as char- ter for invasion and domination, a critique that might still leave a (liberal) concept of the human intact, and a drive to expose a deeper, constitutive, and unredeemable involvement of the very concept of the human (and in particular, the suffering human) in the violence of geopolitical power. Repeatedly, though not consistently, Asad’s essay reaches for this sense of a deeper crisis of the modern concept of the human and its wider constellation rather than its (cynical, partial, and hypocritical) manipulation by power. But whether or not he subscribes to any version of the posthuman paradigm currently in vogue remains utterly unclear... Throughout the essay, as in much of Asad’s writing, one gets the sense that there are only these two sociocultural realities (and modes of thinking) in the world: the liberal-secular-modern (which is im...

Who's killing civilians in Syria?

I make it clear in the book (something I also made clear in my previous book  Desiring Arabs  in the context of post-1967 Arab intellectual debates) that the failure to take political economy seriously in relation to debates about “women in Islam” and the attendant privileging of the idea of cultural determinants can be historicized in terms of the end of the cold war era. Once the USSR was eliminated, the global public sphere becomes dominated by the ideas of West European and US Human Rights and other “development” NGOs, in addition to the expansion of the purview of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund to encompass all of Eastern Europe and the disintegrated Soviet republics (not to mention post-Apartheid South Africa and the post-Oslo yet-still-occupied Palestinian territories). It is then that the liberal language of rights achieves something like global hegemony and questions of political economy recede, almost disappear, in the framing of the problem of “...

Angela Davis's speech Restoring King "There is no figure in recent American history whose memory is more distorted than Martin Luther King Jr. "

Photos from pre-1979 Iran Culture and Imperialism

In  Ways of Seeing ’s final episode, Berger discusses how the goddesses of art became the models of contemporary advertising, and suddenly it was no longer only men looking at images of women lustfully. Advertising tells us that buying a product will transform us by showing pictures of those who have already been transformed by it – these are people we should aspire to be like or be with. An image of an underwear model is desired by men and envied by women. “This state of being envied is what constitutes glamour, and publicity is the process of manufacturing glamour,” Berger says. “Glamour is supposed to go deeper than looks, but it depends upon them, utterly,” he says. Why we still need John Berger's Ways of Seeing

Women's resistane in Syria

Class in more intersectional than intersectionality