Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gxg78 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-26T07:51:32.698Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Cross-Regional Approaches to Middle East Studies: Constructing and Deconstructing a Region

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 March 2016

Charles Kurzman
Charles Kurzman*
Affiliation:
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The Middle East is deconstructing—that is, the concept of a coherent geographic entity with the label “Middle East.” A Thematic Conversation on this subject began at the 2005 MESA Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C., and will conclude at the 2007 meeting in Montréal. These discussions grow out of efforts in the 1990s to rethink area studies globally, spurred by programs at the Ford Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the Social Science Research Council, among others. A variety of scholars have taken up these issues with regard to the Middle East specifically over the past decade, including the Carolina Center for the Study of the Middle East and Muslim Civilizations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which organized this Thematic Conversation.

Type
Essays
Information
Review of Middle East Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 1 , June 2007 , pp. 24 - 29
Copyright
Copyright © Middle East Studies Association of North America 2007

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Tessler, Mark, with Nachtway, Jodi and Banda, Anne, eds., Area Studies and Social Science: Strategies for Understanding Middle East Politics (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1999).Google Scholar

2 Davison, Roderic H., “Where Is the Middle East?” Foreign Affairs 38 (1960): 665–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Keddie, Nikki R., “Is There a Middle East?” International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 255–71.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 Mahan, Alfred Thayer, “The Persian Gulf and International Relations,” The National Review 40 (September 1902): 27–45.Google Scholar

4 United States Government Manual (Spring 1942), p. 149, and (Summer 1944), p. 191.

5 The Middle East Journal 1 (1947), map facing page 1.

6 See, for example, the “Words in Motion” project organized by the Social Science Research Council, http://www.ssrc.org/programs/mena/words_in_motion

7 Ho, Engseng, The Graves of Tarin: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Ernst, Carl W. and Lawrence, Bruce B., Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chisbti Order in South Asia and Beyond (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Laffan, Michael Francis, Islamic Nationhood and Colonial Indonesia: The Umma Below the Winds (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Social Science Research Council, http://www.ssrc.org/programs/idrf.