SPACE IN TIME

The first dimension explored by the authors under review is how space is constituted through time. They develop three themes: space/time compression; the hauntings of space; and the spatial politics of waiting. For many scholars, space-time compression—the elimination of spatial barriers to produce simultaneous temporal experiences across vast distances—is a hallmark of capitalist modernity. On Barak and Esra Akcan complicate our understanding of this compression. Barak neither embraces technological determinism and space/time compression in Egypt as faits accomplis nor emphasizes the resiliency of local diverse experiences to deny any discontinuous experiences of technological change. Instead he sees “technological determinism . . . [as a] historical force, an instrument deployed by actors trying to tame and make sense of a fluid reality” (p. 7, emphasis added). As I show in a later section, Esra Akcan, on the other hand, flips the relationship between time and space on its head, showing how leaders of modern Turkey saw the careful architectural design of space itself as producing a leap from premodern to modern time. As she follows the translation of architectural expertise across global networks, she illustrates the nonlinear nature of the supposed leap.

Barak complicates time/space compression by tracing how technological determinism produces new geographical orders. In a section boldly entitled “Egypt: A State with a Route or a Route with a State?” he argues that the formation of modern Egypt was not simply the work of Mehmet Ali, and the military masterminding and statesmanship for which he is valorized, but also a product of European contestation over trade routes. Barak shows how the coincidental alignment of the business interests of a railroad tycoon, Mehmet Ali's infrastructural projects, and the life-world of a letter documenting an 1857 Indian insurrection intensified Egypt's connections to a global market and drew its destiny closer to that of British colonialism. In his words, “England and India were officially hyphenated by Egypt. An ensemble of railways, laws, telegraphs, political alignments and institutions, waterways, coal depots, and commercial arrangements stabilized this geography and presented it as natural rather than the outcome of contingency, aggression, self-promotion and a great deal of maintenance” (p. 31). In a remarkable twist, the practices through which new states were partitioned from old empires also forged the connections enabling space/time compression and the development of a new imperial environment.

Barak deepens our understanding of space/time compression by arguing that Egyptians experienced it as a comparison of Egyptian speeds and punctuality with their faster-moving Western counterparts. Rather than accepting the expectation that Egypt should move more slowly, Barak investigates the political roots of those differences, brilliantly showing that racialized assumptions about Egyptian “indolence” were built into engineering the speeds that were then perceived as naturally slower. As they engineered a hydraulic system to align a Nile ferry with a railroad track, “designers factored in the levels of the river and the track as well as the mental and technical capacities of native operators, striving for the utmost simplicity” (p. 58). Rather than assume that Egyptian technological innovation would necessarily be inferior to that in the metropole, Barak traces the material impact of these assumptions on engineering, arguing that “translating their understandings of Egypt's politics into railway apparatuses, signaling systems, or layout patterns, British engineers made these understandings durable—parts of the material landscape rather than amorphous ideologies or free-floating representation” (p. 59).

Barak also identifies axes of social differentiation produced by technologies of time/space compression. For example, Egyptian and foreign tramway and train operators were compensated differently, leading to labor mobilization that made nationalist rather than class-based demands. Train conductors waited for foreigners and women (with children) to board their trains but not Egyptian men, who were left to fend for themselves. Inefficiency became gendered when women, represented by the voices of female phone operators, were blamed for the slowness of underpriced telephone networks. Finally, peasants stoning passing trains were identified by Egyptian elites as “demonstrating a superstitious or traditional aversion to modern technology” (p. 39) rather than as people furious at the death of their camels. Barak shows that camels were essential complements to train travel because they waited at stations to take passengers to destinations unreachable by rail, and hence became the trains’ most common victims. Peasants were thus reacting to material economic losses rather than exhibiting the “backward” superstition through which they were othered by foreigners and Egyptian elites alike. By describing the diversity of experiences of space/time compression, Barak illuminates how comparison fueled counter-tempos generative of Egyptian nationalism(s).

In terms of the hauntings of space, Yael Navaro-Yashin shows how, in the context of internationally unrecognized northern Cyprus, it produces a politics of state delegitimization. She conceptualizes northern Cyprus as “a phantomic space” haunted by the ghosts of the Greek-Cypriots who lived there before the 1974 war. These phantoms are “not just a figment of the imagination,” but manifest themselves through the affective energy (discussed at length below) generated by the objects Greeks left behind, such as dwellings, furniture, photographs, and bullet holes (p. 13). The phantoms of Greek-Cypriots then come up against the “make-believe state” or “phantasmatic space” that the administration tries to produce by, for instance, renaming streets and regions and generating internationally unrecognized title deeds to expropriated Greek property. Navaro-Yashin demonstrates a politically productive interplay between the phantomic and the phantasmatic, arguing that the “phantasmatic (the make-believe state) was employed . . . to gloss over the phantomic qualities of the new, carved-up territory” (p. 14). In response, Turkish-Cypriots (depending on their political affiliation) invoked the phantomic to criticize or support the state. Thus, “the ghosts that linger in a territory exert a force against the grain of the make-believe” (p. 15).

Navaro-Yashin also illustrates tensions between the phantomic and the phantasmatic in her incisive discussions of the “legal uncanny.” Tracing the legal system established by the northern Cypriot administration to distribute property that was expropriated from Greeks but still internationally recognized as Greek, she shows how the administration deliberately distributed property and land plots to mirror Turkish Cypriots’ former possessions in southern Cyprus, reproducing “the social structure of Turkish-Cypriots as they had lived in the south.” “The concept of equal value,” she continues, “would symbolically create an appearance, if not a reality of social justice” (p. 194). State efforts to create an equitable perception of the phantasmatic property regime did not always succeed, however. Latife Hanım, who had fled southern Cyprus during the war and now lived in a house with furniture formerly owned by Greeks, “never warmed to this house” where the haunting affect of its objects made her experience her home as “uncanny” (p. 184). The everyday affect through which Cypriots experience phantomic spaces fuels their discomfort with the administration's make-believe property regime. As Nezih, one of Navaro-Yashin's interlocutors, asks rhetorically, “can there be peace of mind in a society of loot?” (p. 195) Navaro-Yashin argues for extending this analysis to all legal states, whose property regimes are based on similarly arbitrary allocations, to develop the concept of the “legal uncanny” to apply to all legal and political regimes rather than just those internationally recognized as illegal (pp. 193 and 200).

Nezih's use of the word “loot” reveals another way in which Navaro-Yashin illuminates the political interplay between the phantomic and the phantasmatic. In northern Cyprus the word ganimet, which originally referred to the spoils of war, “implied a form of self-criticism: [Turkish Cypriots] were commenting on their own involvement, as a community, in the appropriation of material objects and property belonging to the Greek Cypriots” (pp. 152–53). However, the word was also used to challenge state corruption, with the phrase “ganimet state” implying that the administration “had established theft as a generalized practice” (p. 157). This critique became especially salient when the administration altered the originally equitable distribution of property by favoring war veterans and those whose property was damaged by war. Most controversially, the administration distributed expropriated land to migrants from the Republic of Turkey who had never lived in southern Cyprus, and were thus described “as having gained property from the air” (pp. 197–98). Ganimet and the hauntings it evoked offered a powerful criticism of the corrupt and arbitrary make-believe practices of the state.

On Barak also evokes spatial “hauntologies,” but does so to unsettle powerful beliefs about modernity as a disenchanting experience. For example, he shows how the introduction of train travel increased the number of people going to mawlids in honor of saints (a practice seen as unorthodox in official religious circles), making the mawlid as well as the panicked outcry of secularizing elites against it more visible. Rather than disenchanting Egyptians towards an eschatologically empty time, technological advancement facilitated their active enchantment. The superstitious behaviors gaining traction in Egypt, such as women lying on train tracks to rid themselves of jinn (spirit) hauntings, closely mirrored the pathways and mechanics of new technologies.

Finally, on the third theme of the spatial politics of waiting, Pascal Menoret argues that the reappropriation of Riyadh's spaces by young male joyriders is connected to their everyday experiences of time, especially of waiting as a way of life in Saudi Arabia. For Menoret, joyriding emerged from the experience of what Saudis called tufush, “a feeling of social impotence that overwhelmed ordinary Saudis . . . the feeling of being deprived of social or relational capital in a city that could fulfill every dream if one had a useful connection (wasta)” (p. 58). Tufush manifested not just as a relational experience of comparison to better-positioned Saudis but also as a peculiar experience of time. “Being tufshan meant to be confronted with the thickness of time, with impossibility as materialized in emptiness, boredom, and desperation” (p. 58). An experience of marginality and exclusion from the city's opportunities through an unbearable slowing down of time and perpetual waiting for opportunity to materialize did not simply produce passive citizens, however. As Menoret argues, “Tufush, or the awareness of social inadequacy, was a revolutionary sentiment” (p. 59). Understanding the reappropriation of space through joyriding and its revolutionary politics in Riyadh relies on understanding how Saudi's youth experience time as a reflection of their social positioning.

Barak also emphasizes the politics of waiting, in his case to complicate our understanding of female (and the nation's) agency and domination. Unlike in the West, in Egypt “waiting [for a suitor's call] was a role often reserved for men” and male writers and cartoonists depicted women as using phone delays to produce “the procrastination that arouses the male desire” (p. 226). The power of delay was not exclusively gendered but also appeared in national politics. In al-Hakim's novel, ʿAwdat al-Ruh (Return of the Spirit), the character Saniya, symbolizing Egypt, keeps her lover waiting before meeting him on the balcony. Barak points out that Saniya used the technology of the alarm clock to accurately time her delay in attempt to exercise power over her lover despite her impatience to meet him. In Hakim's rendition, the nation's delay in rejecting colonialism would make it appear stronger once the nation finally gained its independence and appeared. Thus, “on some occasions unpunctuality was politically, artistically or romantically potent” (p. 242). Of course, the heightened expectations that come with delay bring greater possibilities for disappointment, such as that experienced by Egyptian nationalists when the postindependence euphoria was burst by the Six Day War.

CONNECTIVITIES ACROSS SPACE

In addition to seeing space through the lens of time, our authors examine the connections across spaces that shape their coproduction. Connectivity is the organizing theme of Esra Akcan's book, tracing networks of architectural expertise across Germany and Turkey in the 1930s and 1940s to investigate modern knowledge production and Republican Turkey's experience of modernity. Akcan's emphasis on connectivity is etched into the very margins of her book. The reader experiences constant movement across space as the margin indicates every few pages that Akcan's narrative has traveled to a different place and time. Hers is no ordinary tracing, however. She frames these networked exchanges of expertise as translations in order to unseat bipolar approaches to the study of modern knowledge production that either assume its dissemination from the West outwards or localize and isolate knowledge production as an antidote to its colonization. Rejecting the “preconception [of translation] as a second-hand and inferior copy where the ‘origin’ gets lost,” Akcan argues that it “reveals the voice of both sides of a cultural exchange . . . [as well as] the geographical distribution of power or capital . . . as it reveals the tensions and conflicts created by perceived inequalities between places” (p. 4). Her investment in this notion of translation is apparent from the architects she follows. She notes that the German architects who came to Turkey were not just those commissioned by the state to help modernize it, but also those fleeing the Nazis who saw Turkey as a thriving hub for architectural thinking. Repression and intolerance is certainly not reserved for a “backward” non-West, nor are knowledge centers reserved for the West. That intellectual refuge is fraught with power dynamics, however. Whereas German architects who espoused socialist ideals were thriving in Turkey and working with the state, their Turkish counterparts faced the state's wrath. As she notes, “the year Schütte-Lihotzky (who would later be imprisoned by the Nazis for her socialist leanings) arrived in Turkey as a political exile, the Turkish poet [Nazım] Hikmet had been sentenced to twenty-eight years for advocating communism” (p. 206).

Ultimately, for Akcan translation opens up questions about translateability, untranslateability, and hybrids that expose “the epistemological and ethical dimensions of cultural interactions” (p. 14). Rather than pitting universalists against nationalists to explore these ethical dimensions, Akcan argues that both are “foreignizing translation” by focusing on the incommensurability of different cultural projects. She then contrasts those foreignizing translation with those emphasizing cultural commensurability and seeking the assimilation of the foreign with the local through “appropriating translation” (p. 16). Suggesting that every translation sits on a spectrum between foreignization and appropriation, Akcan insightfully mobilizes the tension between them to unsettle our understanding of modernity and its global hierarchies.

Akcan's analysis of these tensions illuminates the paradoxes and power dynamics that fueled republican Turkey's modernization project. As the German architect Hermann Jansen brought his interpretations of the English Ebenezer Howard's “garden city” planning models to Ankara, local Turks resisted his attempts to assimilate Turkish elements into his designs. As they wrote to him, “‘we do not want to build houses in traditional Turkish style, but only in modern style’” (p. 88). Rather than the foreigner bringing the universalizing model and locals asking for its domestication, the roles were reversed for the Turkish elite who would inhabit Jansen's planned neighborhoods. However, Akcan highlights the class privilege implicated in such role reversals when she notes that the garden city that these elites promoted was predicated upon a population limit in Ankara of 300,000 people. This was “quite a luxurious solution for a country like Turkey that had to struggle to maintain economic growth throughout the twentieth century” (p. 96). Turkey's elites aligned with foreign experts in preemptively excluding low-income (mostly rural migrant) populations, who would fuel Turkey's late-developmental project but were not planned into the city's landscape. Such translations of foreign architectural ideas into local spaces illuminate not only foreign–local power relations but also their intersections with intrasocietal cleavages.

Similar intersections appear in Akcan's discussion of how the shifting importance of the local vernacular house in modern Turkey challenges dichotomous understandings of the global and the local, as well as unidirectional understandings of knowledge flows. A movement mourning the loss of the vernacular Ottoman house moved from the margins during the early republican era, when the Turkish state sought to cut all ties with the Ottoman past, into the center of the republic's nationalist project only a decade or so later. Although such a movement bent on mainstreaming the vernacular nationalist house might be read as isolationist, Akcan highlights that the vernacular house, now Turkish rather than Ottoman, gained such dominance because of the movement's embeddedness in an international discourse on house origins. As exclusionary nationalisms emerged around the globe, nationalists searched for not only genomic and linguistic origins to distinguish their nations, but also house origins. In Turkey, nationalists achieved notable success ensuring that the Turkish house was recognized internationally as one of the five original models of human housing. It was by joining an international conversation about house origins, and not through isolationism, that a nationalist discourse on the unique Turkish house powerfully shaped architectural practices in Turkey. The power of the nationalist Turkish house discourse culminated in the German Paul Bonatz's design of Siedlung Saraçoğlu, a collective housing project commissioned for housing government officials at the center of Ankara. Siedlung Saraçoğlu's design was based on characteristic features of the Turkish house but planned in accordance with the rationalization models of the German Siedlung. Rather than simply identifying the production of this architectural hybrid with the domestication of global flows, Akcan's tracing of the production of the “local” vernacular house through a global search for house origins challenges our assumptions about a dichotomous understanding of the global and the local and about flows of knowledge between them.

Finally, Akcan's sensitivity to translation unmasks the tensions of women's liberation through the republican secularist project. In her analysis of the model “civilized” woman's house designed for Atatürk's sister, Akcan reveals the irony of “liberated” women being pushed further into invisible interiors of the modern house compared to their experiences with the Orientalized harem of Ottoman residences. Akcan argues that such ironies resulted from “the tension between feminism for women's sake and for the Kemalists’ sake” (p. 194). Tracing the work of translation along networks of global connection thus illuminates intrasocietal power struggles and boundaries as well as global power dynamics.

Farah Al-Nakib and Pascal Menoret also mobilize connectivity, which they use to destabilize a narrative of oil-based modernization in the Gulf. Tracing the networks through which Kuwait and Riyadh respectively were planned, their books seek to embed these cities within larger discourses of modernist planning that were taking place around the globe in the 1950s and 1960s. As Menoret argues, such connections highlight that the trajectories of Gulf cities were unexceptional: “just like other car-based spaces . . . the city was an oil-based city, an environment produced, operated, and navigated thanks to oil” (p. 8). In other words, oil-based economies are not restricted to territories where the oil is being extracted but encompass a more global economic system that encouraged urban planners to privilege a car-based city. As Al-Nakib traces the networks of mostly British planners who shaped Kuwait's planned and unplanned trajectories, she reveals the predominance of a mutated form of Howard's garden city model. This model was similar to the one we saw in Ankara, with the same luxurious assumptions about urban population limits and the dominance of cars initially designed for a postindustrial society. Time and again, plans developed to deal with the excesses of Western industrial urbanization were transplanted to cities and economies that had not yet experienced that industrialization.

Menoret's analysis of the international networks that planned Riyadh highlights similar paradoxes but deepens our understanding of them by situating Riyadh's planning in the context of the Cold War. He shows how the “containment urbanism” of Greek planner Constantinos A. Doxiadis, commissioned to plan Riyadh, was seen as an antidote to the spread of communism. Doxiadis was commissioned by organizations such as the World Bank and the Ford Foundation to lead a wide array of planning projects in the region, most famously designing Baghdad and Islamabad. Menoret argues that it was no coincidence that Doxiadis ended up in Riyadh. As he describes, a long-term adviser to the State Department, Albert Meyer, introduced Doxiadis to Saudi royalty. Meyer had met Doxiadis through his work on the Harvard Pakistan Project—a collaboration between Harvard University and the Ford Foundation to oversee the planning of Islamabad. Meyer's history in Saudi Arabia made the connection especially intriguing. In 1962 he had written in a State Department report that the main threat to the Saudi regime was not ʿAbd al-Nasir's pan-Arab Socialism but an urbanized Bedouin population that could become easily radicalized (and presumably join communist ranks). Lo and behold, one of the main demands of the Saudi regime that Doxiadis, albeit reluctantly, incorporated into his plan was the forced removal of Riyadh's Bedouin populations and their exclusion from future planning. Menoret emphasizes that Riyadh's planning regime was not unique either in a global capital regime based on oil or in Cold War politics.

Finally, Al-Nakib inverts the analysis of connectivity by studying how the breaking of connections in Kuwait through its planning affected the city's socio-political landscape. She describes how, after the city acquired land from owners in the city center and accelerated its evacuation, the state broke connections between residents of the historic Kuwait Town through the mechanism it adopted for suburban relocation. Residents were allotted land through a lottery system on the basis of nuclear family units. As a result, people were unable to relocate next to old neighbors or even extended family members, and many important bonds from the historic Kuwait Town were broken. This was doubly problematic as life in suburban villas impeded natural interaction with neighbors, promoting isolation and inhibiting political organizing. This relocation system also imprinted identity markers on the city's landscape. Al-Nakib demonstrates that the system ensured that the Shiʿa population was concentrated enough geographically to dominate a particular voting district and win a seat in parliament, a significant advantage for a regime that relied on Shiʿa support. She also shows how the state segregated Kuwaiti and non-Kuwaiti residents by outlawing rentals in Kuwaiti-dominated districts that kept non-Kuwaitis out. Al-Nakib observes that “[though] it is difficult to determine if socio-spatial segregation was an intended or unintended outcome of state policy, keeping different social groups away from each other did serve the state's political interests. The main potential threat in mixing Kuwaitis and non-Kuwaitis was the spread of Arab nationalism and other [threatening] ideologies” (p. 140). Al-Nakib's analysis shows that examining the breaking as well as making of connections across spaces provides fascinating insights into society, economy, and politics.

SPATIAL TACTICS AND NONHUMAN AGENCY

Finally, the reviewed authors take us from movement across spaces to the microtactics of both human and nonhuman actors that shape the exercise of agency in space. The study of the spatial tactics deployed by city dwellers to contest dominant powers has an important tradition in Middle East studies, with pioneering scholars of Middle Eastern citiesFootnote ² having set the theoretical conversation about spatial tactics not just in the Middle East but in urban studies more generally. Farah Al-Nakib and Pascal Menoret build on and expand that tradition in important ways. Through a sensitive ethnographic reading of historical records, Al-Nakib explains the notable absence of spatial tactics and reappropriation of spaces in a modernizing Kuwait. Rather than simply blaming acquiescence to a rentier thesis of oil wealth, she compares the ways Kuwaitis mobilized spatial features of preoil Kuwait City to the lived experience of the spatial features of the postoil landscape. She argues that it was not any inherent exceptionalism to oil wealth but the particular imprint that oil left on the city's landscape through the networked process of its planning (discussed earlier) that produced this social isolation and acquiescence. For example, Al-Nakib draws on the memoirs of women who came to Kuwait with the American missionaries’ hospital in the early 1900s to show that in the historic Kuwait Town houses were so proximate that women and children easily used back doors (firya), narrow connecting alleyways (sikik), and connected rooftops to move around the city within the purviews of gender norms (pp. 64–69), and that such gender mobility was lost with the city's suburbanization. As she sheds light on the intricate tactics of female mobility in pre-oil Kuwait, Al-Nakib is careful not to reify female agency, recognizing both the opportunities and limits of that mobility. Although I found her attention to spatial tactics admirable, her insistence on stark comparisons across the two eras did at times err on the side of nostalgia (even as she explicitly claimed not to be writing a nostalgic account [p. 16]), possibly obscuring postoil spatial tactics from her view.

In his book, Pascal Menoret also builds on this tradition but expands our analysis of spatial tactics to deviant behavior. Most studies of spatial tactics mobilized in the Middle East have focused on those tactics, legal and illegal, that were somehow practically useful. With his focus on the politics of joyriding, Menoret studies a behavior not premised on practicality but characterized by a flaunting performance of impracticality involving risk and destruction. The study of deviant, impractical behavior as a spatial tactic opens up questions of whether this behavior can be characterized as an exercise of political agency or simply (in this case) testosterone-driven performance. Menoret provides us with the tools to see the intensely political nature of joyriding in Riyadh. In addition to carefully linking joyriding to tufush as a politicized condition through his ethnography, he traces how joyriders’ reappropriation of particular spaces in the city, and their relish for video-recorded police car chases exposing the police's ineptitude in capturing them (pp. 198–206), aim to produce a particularly political contestation around joyriding. It is of note that joyriders call the police that they outchase hukūma, literally translated as “government,” rather than their classic name shurṭa (p. 202). Menoret's attention to the differences between politicized joyriding and apoliticized middle-class performances of drag racing (pp. 144–46) is especially successful in demonstrating the precise ways that joyriding is a political reappropriation of space. In addition, we learn from Menoret's interviews with joyriders and artful analysis of their poems and internet videos that the Saudi government isn't the only target of the joyriders’ political message, but that joyriding is also “a spectacular response to the global emergence of oil-based spaces” (p. 9). For example, when the first BMW 7 series arrived in Saudi Arabia, the legendary joyrider Bubu drifted and spun the car off the ground while a bystander filmed the scene and sent it to BMW Germany. In one of Menoret's interlocutors’ words, he sent the tape “because [engineers] were claiming that the car would hold the road no matter what, and this guy sent a letter saying: ‘Look at what our kids do to your cars’” (p. 173). It is Menoret's attention to the specific ways in which joyriding was politicized that sets his work apart in pushing the boundaries of how we think of agency in space.

On Barak and Yael Navaro-Yashin are highly invested in bringing nonhuman agency to spatial analysis in the Middle East. Barak builds on Timothy Mitchell's rhetorical question “Can the Mosquito Speak?”Footnote ³ through careful attention to the “assemblages”Footnote ⁴ of nonhuman as well as human actors that contingently come together to empower and limit technological determinism as a historical force and the geographies it produces. In addition to seeing how machines engineered on the basis of racialized assumptions etch inferiority into Egypt's landscape, one of the most memorable moments where nonhuman agency surfaces in the book comes in Barak's depictions of the tunneling ship worm Teredo navalis. In Chapter 1 we see Teredo navalis wreak havoc on telegraphic networks that were meant to connect Egypt and India, as it ate the telegraphic cables submerged under water and disrupted (at least temporarily) the network working to hyphenate England and India by Egypt.

In The Make-Believe Space, Navaro-Yashin also embraces the importance of nonhuman agency but brings two important contributions to that conversation. First, she argues for studying nonhuman agency through “a theory of relationality that moves beyond the distinction between people and things” (p. 19), and does so through a focus on the affect she argues nonhuman things exert on human beings. In her words, “The argument is that the environment exerts a force on human beings in its own right, or that there is something in space, in material objects, or in the environment that exceeds, or goes further and beyond the human imagination, but that produces an affect that may be experienced by human beings, all the same” (p. 18). Second, she argues against embracing the recognition of such affect as normatively positive, which obscures the analytical work affect can produce. Rather than seeing such affect as cozy or comfortable, she finds that, as exerted by the environment in northern Cyprus, it was marked by “irritability,” “a dis-resonating feeling produced by environments that harbor phantoms” (p. 20).

Navaro-Yashin's project to study nonhuman agency relationally through the analytical lens of affect is clearly resonant with the ways she develops the concept of “phantomic space” and how it materialized in Latife Hanım's experience of her environment. Her discussion of “mental borders” in Chapter 3 also powerfully demonstrates the impact of the affect exerted by the nonhuman environment. She describes how a combination of physical trappings around border areas, legal sanctions for crossing the border with southern Cyprus, and the state's rhetoric across a variety of media induce in northern Cypriots a fascinating paradoxical relationship to these borders. On the one hand, we see northern Cypriots critically lament living in “an open air prison” (p. 70). On the other hand, we see northern Cypriots such as her interlocutor Olgun unable to imagine life outside the border and its confinement. As Olgun describes it, “my map ends where the border begins . . . When I cross to the Greek side, I feel scared. I get very anxious . . . When I return to the border and see the flag of the TRNC, I relax” (p. 75). Thus, Navaro-Yashin makes a convincing case for theorizing not only the material but also the relationally affective impact of nonhuman environments on human beings to capture the extent of their agency.

In conclusion, as they embed space in time, draw connections across spaces, and unearth the microtactics of human and nonhuman agents in space, the five books reviewed here deploy masterful projects to expand the dimensions through which we study and mobilize space as an analytical category. The theoretical and methodological tools they develop pave the way for more mindful multidimensional deployments of space in the field—a much-needed enterprise as spatial analysis becomes more and more focal in the study of the Middle East.