The first three articles in this issue, grouped under the subtitle “Insurgency, State Formation, Counterinsurgency,” all deal with historical aspects of nationalism and state-building in the 20th century and resonate with contemporary politics in the Arab world. Starting with Egypt, Omnia El Shakry looks at how student demonstrations in 1935 and 1936 helped usher in the “figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics.” This discourse placed youth at the vanguard of nationalist struggle and social change in Egypt “but only insofar as they could enact a non-antagonistic conception of politics grounded in national unity.” It also foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology in the 1940s, in which adolescence was “reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie.” Given the emphasis on the role of youth in the 2011 uprisings in Arab states, the article has potential theoretical implications for analyses of current events and discourse.

A public discourse of “youth crisis” emerged in 1930s Egypt, partly as a response to the widespread student demonstrations of 1935 and 1936 that ushered in the figure of youth as an insurgent subject of politics. The fear of youth as unbridled political and sexual subjects foreshadowed the emergence of a discourse of adolescent psychology. By the mid-1940s, “adolescence” had been transformed into a discrete category of analysis within the newly consolidated disciplinary space of psychology and was reconfigured as a psychological stage of social adjustment, sexual repression, and existential anomie. Adolescence—perceived as both a collective temporality and a depoliticized individual interiority—became a volatile stage linked to a psychoanalytic notion of sexuality as libidinal raw energy, displacing other collective temporalities and geographies. New discursive formations, for example, of a psychology centered on unconscious sexual impulses and a cavernous interiority, and new social types, such as the “juvenile delinquent,” coalesced around the figure of adolescence in postwar Egypt.

In response to the outbreak of the Arab Revolt of 1936, a coterie of five prominent entrepreneurs and intellectuals in the Mandatory Jewish community formulated a capitalist binationalist resolution of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. This paper examines the genesis of and debate over the little-known Concord they proposed and compares it with better-known liberal and socialist binationalist plans. “The Five,” as they came to be known, were the only binationalists seeking to base political parity on economic integration. The occasion of their blueprint allows further exploration of the preconditions for an effective binationalist program, among them the structure of labor markets, political preferences of minorities and majorities in regard to sovereignty, and levels of mutual trust. Ultimately, binationalist resolutions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict were precluded by the Labor Settlement Movement's separatist state-building strategy.

This article explores the relationship between the administration of President John F. Kennedy and the Arab Baʿth Socialist Party's first regime in Iraq from February to November 1963. It demonstrates that Kennedy administration officials had adopted a paradigm of modernization through which they believed recently decolonized countries could achieve high-consumption economies with democratic governments. Because this process appeared threatened by communist-supported insurgencies, the administration developed a doctrine of counterinsurgency, which entailed support for the repressive capacities of developing states. Administration officials regarded the Iraqi Baʿth Party as an agent of Iraq's modernization and of anticommunist counterinsurgency. They consequently cultivated supportive relationships with Baʿthist officials, police commanders, and members of the party's militia, despite the regime's wide-scale human rights violations. The American relationship with militia members began before the coup that brought the Baʿthists to power, and Baʿthist police commanders involved in the coup were trained in the United States.

In his memoir Istanbul, Orhan Pamuk argues that Istanbul is the site of intense hüzün (melancholy) caused by the loss of the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, like other inhabitants of the city, that is, Istanbullus, his life is imbued with this inescapable melancholy. Taking issue with the apparent anachronism of Pamuk's historical argument, I show how he constructs and naturalizes this association between Istanbul, melancholy, and loss of empire by creating a literary genealogy for his claim. Using the Bakhtinian concept of chronotope (a schema that recognizes and explains the patterns of fusion of time, space, and emotion as thematic constellation or narrative pattern), I argue that what Pamuk identifies in and derives from the writings of his predecessors is the chronotope of Istanbul. I show how Pamuk constructs the hybrid literary canon and tradition (that references Balzac and Joyce as much as it does Beyatlı and Tanpınar) in which he locates himself in the process of deriving this chronotope.

This article reconsiders Turkey's 1928 alphabet reform by shifting the focus from the state to the social experiences of alphabet change. Rather than assuming an obedient and indifferent public silently following the decrees of an authoritarian and repressive regime, it explores the actual processes, institutions, and lived experiences of the alphabet reform by drawing on a variety of sources, including unpublished archival evidence and personal narratives collected through oral interviews. It draws attention to the multiplicity of experiences of learning to read and write (the new letters) as well as to the persistence of the Ottoman script; it also examines the variety of ways that state authorities dealt with this persistence. The analysis of this particular reformist measure has implications for understanding social change and the emergence of a nationalist culture in the early republican period as well as state–society relations and the nature of the Kemalist state.

This article scrutinizes election district and inspection district reports written by the deputies of the Turkish single-party government and the role of these reports in state decision making. Underscoring social discontent and the fragile hegemony of the new regime—both of which motivated the republican elite to monitor state and party administrations and public opinion—the article argues that the practice of reporting was neither a project of social engineering nor a practice peculiar to the Turkish state but rather a requirement of a polity concerned with the opinion of its citizens. In the absence of direct political participation of the people in government, the reports mediated between the state and society. Contrary to conventional accounts of the single-party period, the article argues that the republican elite did not govern the country through top-down decrees but instead sought to ascertain public opinion and its own administrative defects so as to consolidate its fragile hegemony. Based on these findings, I propose that we redefine the early republican state as a flexible authoritarian regime that was not detached from the society.

The question that the five literary scholars participating in this roundtable have set out to answer is the following: “How has ‘theory’ affected the field of Arabic literature in the Unites States and vice versa?” By theory, we understand both the entire range of poststructuralist critical practice that emerged through continental philosophy in the 1960s and the canonical disciplinary object that came to dominate departments of literature in the United States in the 1980s. Most of us were beginning our graduate careers around this latter decade, in departments of Middle East studies or English and comparative literature, and experienced firsthand that moment of encounter referred to in the following essays. A couple of decades later, and irrespective of our institutional locations, all of us, as a matter of course, continue to work at the intersection between national traditions and the world of theory, as do our colleagues in the field and our graduate students. At the same time, there was a feeling amongst us of being at a crossroads of sorts—a certain sense of malaise, or perhaps urgency, that manifested itself in a recurring set of questions about the field here and now: questions about history and reading, about translation and audiences, and about institutional and cultural politics, that all somehow emerged from the era of sanctions and war during which we came of age and that now haunt the time of revolution in which we live. If the present roundtable raises more questions than it answers, we hope that it will at least initiate a broader discussion about the practice and purpose of the discipline of Arabic literature in the American humanities today.

By every indicator—methodology, citations, paper titles—students of Arabic literature have been courting “theory” for decades. From the 1970s on, scholars have approached classical and modern Arabic literature with theoretical models that draw explicitly on structuralism, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, semiotics, performance studies, and so on. That said, until recently the mainstream of modern Arabic studies continued to use methods inherited from Orientalist scholars working on classical texts.

Near the beginning of his classic work of historiography, The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Moroccan thinker Abdallah Laroui inserts a footnote about a study of the region by a Harvard-based American author who refers to North Africa as “no idea producing area,” a statement that Laroui thoroughly dismantles in a couple of sentences. In this short note at the start of a book written forty years ago, Laroui pinpoints the central problem in U.S.-based studies of the Arab region. The historically contested nature of knowledge production in the field cannot be ignored in any attempt to address the question of critical theory's influence on Arabic literature in the American academy.

For the discipline of Arabic literature in the United States, “theory” is a double entendre: promise, danger. Until the mid-1990s, U.S. Arabic literary studies was landlocked in Near Eastern language departments, whose “anti-theoretical” bent Magda Al-Nowaihi imputes to dependence on U.S. government and Gulf state support. Theory is “dangerous” to such funders, Al-Nowaihi maintains, because it traffics in “the relations between knowledge and power. . . . The result is a situation where European departments produce the theory, we provide the raw material.” “Theory” is what Arabic literature needs—to become a site and an agent of aesthetic-political critique—yet lacks because powers of state insulate its energies within microtextual hermeneutics. Uniquely empowered to translate Arabic literature from particularist “ghetto” to universalist (Euro-dominant) “center” through the abstracting medium of “theory,” then, “European departments” control Arabic literature's legitimization. What emerges is a curious chiasmus: “theory” is at once a danger to state power and a desideratum for Arabic literature, on the one hand, and a seat of institutional power within the U.S. humanities and a danger to Arabic literature, on the other.

In most Western universities, Arabic literature is rarely studied by itself or for itself. It is subject to disciplinary traffic and intersections, on the one hand, and to what might be called a political predicament, on the other. With this in mind, I outline below some thoughts underpinned by two examples of the state of the art in Arabic literary studies, published four decades apart.

The past twenty years witnessed a dramatic transformation in Arabic literature studies in the United States. In the early 1990s, the field was still almost exclusively a satellite of area studies and largely bound by Orientalist historical and epistemological paradigms. Graduate students—even those wishing to focus entirely on modern literature—were trained to competence in the entire span of the Arabic literary tradition starting with pre-Islamic times, and secondary research languages were still rooted in the philological tradition of classical scholarship. The standard requirement was German, with Spanish as a distant second for those interested in Andalusia, but rarely French, say, or Italian or Russian. Other Middle Eastern languages were mainly conceived as primary-text languages rather than research languages. Philology, traditional literary history, and New Criticism formed the methodological boundaries of research. “Theory”—even when it purported to speak of the world outside Europe—was something that was generated by departments of English and comparative literature on the other side of campus, and crossings were rare and complicated in both the disciplinary and the institutional sense. Of course, one branch of “theory”—postcolonial studies—made its way into area studies much faster than the more eclectic offshoots of continental philosophy, for obvious reasons. From nationalism studies to subaltern studies, from Benedict Anderson to Gayatri Spivak, the wave of postcolonial critical theory that swept through U.S. academia in the 1980s and 1990s sparked an uprising in area studies at large and particularly in the literature disciplines. One of the first casualties of this uprising was the old historical paradigm itself: narratives of rise and fall, golden ages, and ages of decadence. Slowly but surely, scholars began to question the entire epistemological edifice through which Arabic literary history had been constructed by Orientalism. It was through the postcolonial theory of the 1980s that Arabic literature came to a broader rapprochement with poststructuralism: Foucault, Derrida, Ricoeur, Jameson, and White, to name a few of the major thinkers who began to transform the field in the late 1990s.

Among the Arab states of the Middle East and North Africa, Saudi Arabia is at once paradigmatic and exceptional. The kingdom epitomizes what every schoolchild knows about this part of the world—limitless deserts, camel-herding nomads, oil wells, jet-setting princes, reactionary religious authorities, severely restricted gender relations—all in one neat package. At the same time, it takes these features to extremes approximated only by neighboring Abu Dhabi and Qatar, neither one of which has elicited anything like the same degree of journalistic or scholarly scrutiny. It is no wonder that the concept of the rentier state has been applied more persistently and innovatively to Saudi Arabia than anywhere else, including Iran, whose political economy the notion was originally coined to describe.