Explores experiences of being modern in Arab transitional societies.

In this groundbreaking book, Tarik Sabry is seeking out the terrain for best understanding the experience of being modern in transitional societies. He adopts a dynamic, ethnographically based approach to the meanings of 'modernness' in the Arab context and, within a relational framework, focuses on structures of thought, everydayness and self-referentiality to explore the process of building a bridge that rejoins the 'modern' in Arab thought with the 'modern' in Arab lived experience. In bringing together modernity as a philosophical category with the bridging spaces of Arab everyday life, Sabry is offering fresh methods of comprehending the question of what it means to be modern in the Arab world today.

Examines how popular culture has shaped the ways Americans define their "interests" in the Middle East. Author McAlister argues that U.S. foreign policy, while grounded in material and military realities, is also developed in a cultural context. American understandings of the region are framed by narratives that draw on religious belief, news media accounts, and popular culture. This book skillfully weaves readings of film, media, and music with a rigorous analysis of U.S. foreign policy, race politics, and religious history.--From publisher description.

In the field of American studies, attention is shifting to the long history of U.S. engagement with the Middle East, especially in the aftermath of war in Iraq and in the context of recent Arab uprisings in protest against economic inequality, social discrimination, and political repression. Here, Alex Lubin and Marwan M. Kraidy curate a new collection of essays that focuses on the cultural politics of America's entanglement with the Middle East and North Africa, making a crucial intervention in the growing subfield of transnational American studies. Featuring a diverse list of contributors from the United States, the Arab world, and beyond, American Studies Encounters the Middle East analyzes Arab-American relations by looking at the War on Terror, pop culture, and the influence of the American hegemony in a time of revolution. Contributors include Christina Moreno Almeida, Ashley Dawson, Brian T. Edwards, Waleed Hazbun, Craig Jones, Osamah Khalil, Mounira Soliman, Helga Tawil-Souri, Judith E. Tucker, Adam John Waterman, and Rayya El Zein.

'Arab Cultural Studies: Mapping the Field' is the first attempt to explore ways of conceptualising and theorising the nascent field of Arab Cultural Studies. It reflects and engages in an interdisciplinary discussion on the different facets of Arab cultural studies, including gender, economy, history, epistemology, language, method, politics, literary and cultural criticism, institutionalization, popular culture, creativity and much more. The book presents a meta-narrative about how scholars have thus far thought and re-thought the field. It brings together prominent and emerging experts, writing from both Arab and Western academia, to engage with key complex, epistemic and methodological questions and to articulate in the meantime the new kinds of language and hermeneutics necessary for the appropriation of an historically conscious and coherent field of scientific enquiry into contemporary Arab media, culture and society.

Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.

In this revealing new study, Tarik Sabry and Joe Khalil preside over an original new exploration of Arab culture. They employ subjects as varied as anthropology, media studies, philosophy, political economy and cultural studies to illuminate the relationship between culture, time and publics in an Arab context, whilst also laying the foundations for a much more nuanced picture of Arab society. The diverse themes and locations explored include communities at borders, in rural and urban locations, Syrian drama audiences, Egyptian, Saudi and Tunisian artists and activists and historical and contemporary Arab intellectuals. This fresh empirical research and interdisciplinary analysis illuminate intricate experiences that transcend local, national and religious boundaries and expose how Arab publics combine the media and technology to create a rich experience that shapes their collective imagination and social structure. Providing a grounded orientation to key debates on time and what can be defined as public in modern Arab cultures, Sabry and Khalil address teachers, students and those concerned about the delicate structures that underpin the upheavals of the modern Arab world.

This is one of the first books in English to explore Arab responses to Western culture and values in modern Arab literature. Through in-depth research El-Enany examines the attitudes as expressed mainly through works of fiction written by Arab authors during the twentieth, and, to a lesser extent, nineteenth century. It constitutes an original addition to the age-old East-West debate, and is particularly relevant to the current discussion on Islam and the West. Alongside raising highly topical questions about stereotypical ideas concerning Arabs and Muslims in general, the book explores representations of the West by the foremost Arab intellectuals over a two-century period, up to the present day, and will appeal to those with an interest in Islam, the Middle East, nationalism and the so-called ‘Clash of Civilizations’.