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Swimming Against the Tide Personal Passions and Academic Fashions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Leila Fawaz*
Affiliation:
(1997 MESA Presidential Address)

Extract

A New Academic fashion in the disciplines of history, anthropology, and cultural criticism is to “foreground” authors in works of scholarship. But it is not in imitation of what is currently fashionable that I have chosen to make my address autobiographical. I am a historian who enjoys writing narrative history and who elsewhere has argued that the narrative remains as valuable and as legitimate in modern scholarship as theory. So here I wish to tell a story that may hold some lessons for those scholars who seek freedom from the constraints imposed both by the norms of Middle Eastern societies and by the rules of the western academy. In our post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial world, all the certitudes have been shaken, and the narrative might well be the only kind of story that we can relate to with any kind of authority.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 1998

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References

1 This essay is dedicated to the memory of Claire Korkor Tarazi (1921-1998). Natalie Zemon Davis’s “A Life of Learning,” Charles Homer Haskins Lecture for 1997, American Council of Learned Societies, ACLS Occasional paper, No. 39,” also inspired me, as did biographical essays by Albert Hourani, Charles Issawi, Abdul-Karim Rafeq, Kamal Salibi, and others. I also thank Sugata Bose, Dale Eickelman, Sol Gittleman, Ayesha Jelal, and Margaret Sevcenko for their insightful suggestions; Jon Anderson, Anne Betteridge, Charles Davidson, John Esposito, Nimr Ibrahim, Farhad Kazemi, Constance Moynihan, and John Voll for their help.