The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph, where Joseph Massad tells us that writing the book helped him “understand how I became a Palestinian Jordanian” (p. xi). He then shares his hope that Colonial Effects will “explain the process through which the Jordanian people came to see ‘ourselves’ the way ‘we’ do” (p. xi). As a Palestinian Jordanian commentary on “the making of national identity in Jordan,” Colonial Effects is impressive. As a commentary on the “we” Jordanian identity might stand for, the book is vexed by the gap (rarely acknowledged by Massad) between identity as an artifact of law and identification as a structure of feeling. Massad is alert to the legal apparatus that underlies Jordanian identity; his historical analysis of it is careful and insightful. On matters of Jordanian identification, however, there is much he cannot see. The ideological cohesiveness of Massad's work, its recognizable place within the field of Jordanian identity politics, is both its strength and, rather predictably, its weakness.

Colonial Effects revisits themes familiar to students of Jordanian history. Using a complex array of sources, Massad argues that (1) Jordanian national identity is a product of colonial and postcolonial institutions; (2) its national symbols—ranging from food to dress to dialect—are invented features or strategically manipulated “effects” of these post/colonial institutions; (3) Jordanian nationalism is marked by two competing strains, one Pan-Arab and anticolonial, the other Hashemite, localizing, and reliant on Western patronage; and (4) Jordanian nationalism since 1948 increasingly has been defined in opposition to an internal, Palestinian Other. Massad's analysis conforms nicely to standard, post-Hobsbawmian views of nationalism. His critical apparatus, which draws heavily on the work of poststructuralist and postcolonial superstars, also conforms to a (by now) fairly distinct genre: Foucault mixed with Gramsci, with genuflections to Althusser, Mitchell, Fabian, Bhabha, Said, Chatterjee, and others. The theoretical pyrotechnics are, at times, excessive, but the historiographical infrastructure on which Massad builds his analysis will be of use to a broad range of scholars. His account is meticulously documented throughout—with over 1,000 footnotes—and his tight focus on two colonial institutions (the military and the law) gives his analysis the same “repressive” and “productive” qualities he attributes (à la Foucault) to the institutions he dissects.

Massad's principal claim is that military and legal structures have played a dominant role in the making of Jordanian identity. Much ink is given to asserting the novelty of this claim, yet it is hard to imagine a nation state, post/colonial or otherwise, in which legal conventions are not essential to the task of defining membership—and harder still to imagine a modern state whose national sovereignty is not expressed, and protected, by police and military forces. If few books about nationalism focus exclusively on these institutions, it is because mass media, popular culture, education, civil society, political movements, and indigenous, prenational structures of authority often have more peculiar, and less obvious, effects on the social construction of nation states. Massad's attraction to the military and the law is actually a byproduct of his tendency to see Jordan—in its formative encounters with Palestinians and Palestine—as a bedouin-dominated army commanded by an English officer who valorized bedouin custom and specialized in codifying and enforcing tribal law.

John Bagot Glubb (“Glubb Basha,” general of the Arab Legion from 1939 to 1956) is the animating force behind Colonial Effects. Massad's critical engagement with Glubb is riveting, largely because the stakes for Massad are so high. He has turned Glubb Basha into a compressed symbol of the colonial project, the creative genius behind Jordanian identity. It was Glubb, after all, who designed the red kaffiyeh Jordanians wear so proudly, brought bagpipes and massed bands to Jordan, and made official the bedouin fetishism that now passes for “Jordanian heritage.” Apparently, he is even responsible for the fact that millions of Jordanians believe mansaf is their national dish. Although he discerns in Glubb the failings one would expect of a British general, mid-20th century—he was an exhibitionist, racist, Orientalist, imperialist, old-fashioned Victorian struggling with his own (a)sexuality—Massad obviously has immense respect for the man. Glubb is both his champion (for constructing a faux tribal/bedouin national identity Massad can now deconstruct) and the perfect foil (who proves Massad is wise to Glubb's tricks in ways ordinary Jordanians, alas, are not). Rarely have character assassination and hagiography been so artfully combined, with the odd result that Glubb emerges as the only well-rounded character, the only “actor,” in Massad's book. All others, even Hashemite royals, seem reactionary by comparison. If the virtue of Foucauldian analysis is its ability to find power everywhere, emanating from above and below, then the vice of Massad's analysis is his ability to find power, transformative power, only in Glubb and the nationalizing agendas he set in motion.

Massad is committed to the idea that Jordanian identity is a kind of ersatz replacement culture devised by British colonial officers and then imposed on a subject population who unwittingly accepted it as the real thing. The assumptions underlying this model are dismissive of the creative and ideological effort Jordanians have given to making their own national culture by articulating older identities with newer ones. It is strange that Massad has almost nothing to say about the substance of tribal law, given his focus on law. Tribes, likewise, he presents as fodder for Glubb's army, not as active forms of identification that predated and now intermingle with the Jordanian nation state. Massad's approach, in effect, disconnects Jordanian nationalism from local forms of identification, unless those forms are anti-Palestinian. Ironically, many scholars of Palestinian nationalism, Massad included, have abandoned as retrograde a prior tendency to depict Palestinian identity as merely a reaction to Zionism and British colonial policy. This shift was accomplished by engaging seriously with local models of history and identity that made later forms of Palestinian identification possible. The benefits of this approach are absent from Colonial Effects. Instead, Massad concludes that Jordanian identity, as it exists today, is an elaborate display of false consciousness, a “proof of colonialism's perpetual victory over the colonized” (p. 278). The conclusion is grim; it reproduces a political discourse in which Palestinian and Jordanian identities develop at each other's expense, rejecting each other's claims on the past, accentuating in each other the illegitimating powers of foreignness. If Jordan's “exclusivist nationalists” attempt to marginalize the kingdom's Palestinians by saying you were not here in the beginning, Massad's response to them, beneath its fine intellectual veneer, is no less simplistic: neither were you.