Aesthetic Fields

From its foundation, MERIP has been a big tent, a collective of activists, artists, and (later) academics (both students and more established scholars) largely based in the United States but representing a diversity of backgrounds, expertise, and engagements, seeking to forge a counter-public outside the strictures of the United States policy establishment and historically pro-Israeli news media and academy. The operational model has been one of dissensus both in terms of challenging what is taken for granted and of cultivating dissent, but also in terms of sustaining an internal field of argumentation without the need for a forced consensus. While sharing broad commitments against imperialism, for social justice, and in solidarity with Palestine, members of the collective have had diverse ideological leanings, and MERIP, as an organization, has refrained from taking official, public positions on certain divisive issues like the two-state solution, BDS, or the scope of humanitarian/military intervention in regional conflicts. Editorial committee meetings could be contentious affairs, with lines of division occasionally arising between activists and academics, between Marxist materialists and practitioners of different forms of critical cultural studies. The resulting magazine issues reflect such diversity and debate within a common secular progressive perspective, and the managing/executive editors, while heavy-handed with their red pencils, have refrained from imposing a dogmatic interpretive line. Indeed, MERIP was not shy about publishing critical reviews of works written by members of their own editorial collective – sometimes in the same issue where excerpts from those very works were featured. Opinion pieces, analytical essays, interviews, reviews, and creative works lived side by side in productive tension.

Such heterogeneity in content and form was particularly evident during MERIP's first decades, arguably at the very moment when a political economy analytical through-line became consolidated and risked subordinating culture aesthetic to a materialist critique. A 1976 special issue on “Resistance and Culture” included analytical essays surveying Arab cinema and Egyptian dramas, as well as reprints of a Cinéaste interview with the Palestinian Cinema Association and a critical review in Le Monde by Algerian film scholar Lotfi Maherzi of two recent Algerian films selected at the Cannes festival. Few of the films or theatrical productions in question were available in the United States, the issue apparently did not achieve wide circulation, and it would be another 13 years before MERIP would dedicate another issue to “culture.” However, the magazine's regular coverage of aesthetic expression and artistic performances actually increased in the intervening years, mostly focusing on film and theater, but also gradually addressing poetry and novels (and, to a lesser extent, music, photography, and graphic arts) as well. This paralleled the increasing availability of such cultural artifacts to an American public, including the first vinyl recordings of Egyptian singer/oudist Sheikh Imam and the first Middle East film festival in New York, advertised in the magazine in 1977 and 1978 respectively.

By the mid-1980s, Barbara Harlow would become a frequent contributor and ultimately an active member of the editorial collective, joining Anita Vitullo (Khoury) in authoring essays on film and literature for the next 15 years. In addition, Joel Beinin would dedicate regular space in his Editor's Bookshelf column (1988–91) to reviews of literature, film, and music. Anthropologists, art historians, and literary scholars including Lila Abu-Lughod, Ammiel Alcalay, David McMurray, Ella Shohat, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg (and later Hisham Aidi, Lori Allen, Walter Armbrust, Shiva Balaghi, Eliott Colla, Salah Hassan, Ursula Lindsey, Garay Menicucci, Nada Shabout, Paul Silverstein, and Jessica Winegar), would likewise expand MERIP's coverage of expressive culture – including cartoons, music, painting, oral performance, photography, poetry, satellite media, street art, television serials, and theater – from the late 1980s forward. In addition to two groundbreaking essays on Arab exile and diasporic filmmaking, Miriam Rosen used her base in Paris to conduct a series of interviews with Middle Eastern filmmakers, writers (including Tahar Ben Jelloun), media professionals, and political exiles (including Abraham Serfaty) from 1989 to 1993.

Indeed, throughout the 1980s and 1990s, it was a rare issue of Middle East Report that did not include some space dedicated to cultural performance, with key essays by Mehdi Abedi and Michael M.J. Fischer on Iranian revolutionary posters, by Martin Stokes on Arabesk music, and by Lila Abu-Lughod on Egyptian television serials anticipating their subsequent books.Footnote ⁴ These efforts culminated in a 2001 special issue on “Culture and Politics” with essays on Iranian cinema (Ziba Mir-Hosseini), Iranian photography (Anthony Shadid and Shiva Balaghi), Arab “world music” (Ted Swedenburg), and Arabic literature in translation (Hosam Abu-Ela). In the years which followed, culture reviews became less regular as sections within the magazine as such – with the notable exception being the 2012 special issue on “The Art and Culture of the Arab Revolts” with a lead essay by Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar – but they became relatively frequent as online contributions to MERIP's website where word count limits are not determined by printing costs.Footnote ⁵ The relegation of culture aesthetic to the website arguably points to its relative expendability, despite the fact that online MERIP articles were accessible without a subscription and thus tended to be more broadly read and cited.

Beyond its intermittent coverage of expressive culture, MERIP also served as a site for cultural production. From 1977 to 1978, MERIP reported on the imprisonment, hunger strike, and trial of Egyptian poet and Sheikh Imam collaborator Ahmed Fuad Negm, publishing two of his “calls” for international action against the repressive policies of the Sadat regime and translating several of his social critique poems. In subsequent issues, MERIP would continue to translate contemporary Arabic poetry, including by André Chedid, Nazik al-Malaika, and Ahmadi Ookswi to accompany a Marisa Escribano photo essay on Egyptian women (1979); by Mizrahi poets Erez Bitton (1980); Sami Chetrit (1989), Shelley Elkayam (1989), and Erez Breton (1989); Palestinian poets Rashid Hussein (1986), Mahmoud Darwish (1988, 2008), and Taha Muhammad Ali (199); Syrian bard Nizar Qabbani (1987, 1988); the Iraqi Ahmad Mattar (1987); the Sudanese writer Mohammed al-Mahdi al-Majdhoub (1988); and Lebanese-American female poets Etel Adnan (1989, 1990, 1997) and Mohja Kahf (1997, 2000); among many others. Darwish's 1988 poem, “Those Who Pass Between Fleeting Words,” headlined an issue devoted to the Intifada and was accompanied by an essay by Ammiel Alcalay unpacking the hysterical reaction to the poem when first published in the Jerusalem Post.Footnote ⁶ Darwish was subsequently interviewed in the magazine on the situation in Palestine in 1995,Footnote ⁷ and MERIP later published two of his poems (“Mural” and “At the Station of a Train That Fell off the Map”) in mourning of his passing in 2008. MERIP led its coverage of the September 11, 2001 attacks and the war on terror aftermath with Palestinian Brooklynite spoken-word poet Suheir Hammad's heart-wrenching “first writing since.” Most recently, in 2021, Lisa Wedeen published three short poems by the Syrian Osama Esber in bilingual form, the first time MERIP had published extended text in Arabic.Footnote ⁸ While relatively rare, these poetic texts published across the years do not simply illustrate the social and political events being covered in the magazine, but constitute interpretive engagements on par with the analytical essays that surround them.

Poetry was certainly an efficient way for MERIP to elevate Middle Eastern artistic culture in its pages, but it was by no means the only creative form given expression in the magazine. MERIP also published translated short storiesFootnote ⁹ as well as excerpts from memoirs,Footnote ¹⁰ vignettes,Footnote ¹¹ travelogues,Footnote ¹² and other forms of creative non-fiction and experimental journalism.Footnote ¹³ And then there was Al Miskin, a collectively authored political satire that ran fairly regularly in the magazine from 1988 to 1998 and threatens an occasional return.

But perhaps MERIP's most important creative engagement was graphical, not textual. Photography has been a central feature of the magazine in both print and online versions, both to illustrate written articles and as special photo essays, the first of which appeared in 1979. From its early years, MERIP regularly republished political cartoons from the region with brief translated captions. In 1987, the magazine featured a two-page spread of Palestinian cartoonist Naji al-‘Ali's work on the occasion of his assassination while in exile in London, with a personal remembrance by MERIP editor and filmmaker Joan Mandell.Footnote ¹⁴ Several years later, Susan Slyomovics published an analytical piece on North African caricatures of the Gulf War, featuring eleven cartoon images reprinted from Algerian and Moroccan newspapers, as part of a special 1993 Middle East Report issue on “Power, Mass Media and the Middle East.”Footnote ¹⁵ Several cartoons similarly accompanied a long interview with Sudanese political artist Khalid Albaih about ethical responsibility and social critique in the wake of the January 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo.Footnote ¹⁶

In addition to such reprints, MERIP also published original work by various illustrators, including by the Iraqi artist Dia al-Azzawi to accompany the 1987 translation of Dia’ Khudair's short story about the Iran-Iraq war.Footnote ¹⁷ But most prominently featured in the first decades of MERIP was the work of Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, who served for many years on the editorial committee and as MERIP's design editor, designing several versions of the logo and many cover graphics. His fine drawings conjoining geometrical form with calligraphy graced the pages of the first years of MERIP Reports. He provided artwork for Fawwaz Traboulsi's beautiful text “Beirut-Guernica: A City and A Painting” (1988), translated by art critic John Berger. Over the years he also contributed essays on public art and music to accompany special issues on “Popular Culture” (1989) and his native Jerusalem (1993), as well as translating poems by Rashid Hussein. His books and exhibitions frequently received rave but engaged reviews in the pages of MERIP, with Lisa Frank praising his book Faithful Witnesses: Palestinian Children Recreate Their World for its “moral urgency” and “collaborative cultural production,” as “clearly stamped ‘Made in the Intifada’.”Footnote ¹⁸ Miriam Rosen similarly exalted Stranger at Home, a documentary film about Boullata's 1985 return from exile to Jerusalem, as a “film you want to see more than once (and should).”Footnote ¹⁹ In a 2019 online tribute to Boullata on the occasion of his death, long-term contributing editor Penny Johnson described him as “a faithful witness: to the city of his birth, Jerusalem, to both his Palestinian compatriots and ancient Arab poets, and to the restless, beautiful, daunting world in which he and Lily [Farhoud] wandered before he returned to his final resting place in Jerusalem.”Footnote ²⁰ A number of MERIP colleagues have worked to maintain the beauty of MERIP's design, including Jimmy Bishara who oversaw layout and developed the magazine's cover aesthetic from 1998 through 2019, as well as long-term photo (and current managing) editor Michelle Woodward, who has ensured that the photographic texts made an integral contribution to the magazine's critical narrative.

Cultural Politics

Artwork, creative texts, and cultural reviews have never been merely supplemental to MERIP's project. It was founding editor Joe Stork who recruited Boullata and other editorial committee members like Slyomovics for their attention to “culture,” who solicited essays from McMurray and Swedenburg and many others writing about music, film, literature, and the arts. Elevating cultural expression and aesthetic performance from the region was an act of political defiance in and of itself, pushing back against a Eurocentric narrative that would, in Said's analysis, deny “the Orient” artistic agency and access to the sublime on its own terms. To be sure, the bulk of the essays in any given MERIP issue was devoted to imperial states and their challengers, and for years at a time the attention of writers and readers was channeled to critical world events and violent geopolitical confrontations, from the 1973 October war and the 1979 Iranian revolution through the multiple intifadas, enduring Lebanese civil conflict, Gulf wars, invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, coups and state terror in Turkey, North African uprisings, and ongoing civil war in Syria, Yemen, and throughout the region. The United States increasingly became a direct actor in these conflicts, shifting the position of U.S.-based authors and readers from one of distant solidarity and allyship with Egyptian workers and Palestinian militants to one of ethical responsibility and intimate agency, particularly given the domestic anti-Arab and Islamophobic violence of the war on terror. At such times, writing about cultural issues might appear to be an indulgence and a diversion, and it is perhaps not accidental that those special issues explicitly on “culture” appeared during liminal periods between the first Intifada and the second Gulf War, just prior to September 11th, or in the optimistic horizon of the “Arab Spring.” As Kirsten Scheid has argued, the Western journalistic hailing of an Arab artistic “awakening” during the 2011 revolts risks erasing millennia of aesthetic contributions and reifying ontological divides: “The new forays into the aesthetic mark the narcoleptic population's arrival at the threshold of maximum humanity.”Footnote ²¹ In other words, the inconsistency of MERIP's incorporation of culture aesthetic into its political economic framework may work directly against its broader critical humanist project.

MERIP authors and editors have been more than aware of these risks and pitfalls, and they have been thoughtful in their portrayals of the complex entanglements of culture and politics. “There remains the risk, particularly in making popular culture into a special issue of a magazine,” wrote Timothy Mitchell, drawing on Raymond Williams, “of taking for granted the split between the cultural and the material, between the world of ideas and the world of things. The real challenge. . . is to retain a sense of the primacy of certain social relations and the historical forces they generate.” “Popular culture,” when understood as “people's everyday music, stories, artifacts, jokes, performance, pastimes and poetry,” appears to “promise access to the autonomous and untainted voice of ordinary people.” But, Mitchell insists, political regimes “have long ago turned authenticity and tradition into a vocabulary for enforcing the powerlessness of ordinary lives,” and “[e]ven those popular cultural forms in the Middle East that seem most traditional and unchanging turn out to borrow, mix and invent.”Footnote ²²

Building on Mitchell's theoretical model, Lila Abu-Lughod and the other authors in the 1989 “Popular Culture” issue underlined this “transculturalism”Footnote ²³ whereby global technologies, capitalist consumerism, and transnational cultural symbols, as “actively interpreted and reinterpreted, judged according to local moral standards but also used to counter these standards,” enable creativity and improvisation within shifting Bedouin or Moroccan “tradition.”Footnote ²⁴ Indeed, a number of MERIP authors across the decades celebrate the cross-fertilization, inter-ethnicity, hybridity, syncretism, and “blending and mixing” through which Mizrahi writers remake Israeli culture,Footnote ²⁵ or Maghrebi expatriate writers “revitalize[e] and energiz[e] the French novel,”Footnote ²⁶ or raï artists show the proverbial finger to the Algerian and French religious/cultural purists,Footnote ²⁷ or Middle Eastern television viewers build novel identities in the diaspora,Footnote ²⁸ or an elite Saudi youth “subverts dominant gender, generational and moral norms.”Footnote ²⁹ Michael M.J. Fischer was perhaps the most reckless in his postmodernist invocation of a generalized borderlands of cultural innovation and cosmopolitan creativity, invoking “translators across linguistic and cultural strata, people who tunnel inside monolingual or monoperspectival assumptions, revealing and amplifying hidden multicultural traces, and who take the time to explain, to show connections, to tell stories, to borrow images and reinvent them with other cultural content.”Footnote ³⁰

But, over the decade which followed, authors proverbially brought the state back in, responsibly pointing to the ways in which dominant ideologies and state pressures overdetermine the dynamics of these popular cultural forms and torpedo simplified narratives of cultural resistance. Martin Stokes described Arabesk – the music of migrants from the impoverished southeast living in gecekondu squatter districts – as standing “in direct opposition to this official Kemalist conception of culture,” as an “alien cultural artifact” and a “threat,” but he went on to detail how it was quickly appropriated by the nationalist Motherland Party and tethered to an “ideology of passivity.”Footnote ³¹ Lila Abu-Lughod recognized how Egyptian television serials may have a “certain independence from the government (reflected in the social criticism characteristic of their productions),” but that they simultaneously “uphold the secular national institutions of the post-colonial state, promote the ideals of informed citizenship, and deplore what they view as abuses of basically good institutions like the law, government, education and the family.”Footnote ³² Walter Armbrust presented a similar story about the ways Egyptian films, in their representations of sexuality, transgress some forms of patriarchy while reproducing others: “Films normalize behavior unthinkable to previous generations, but that is not the whole story. They also construct new conceptual boundaries that later generations must either elaborate on or reject.”Footnote ³³ For Rebecca Stein, Israeli works like the docu-series Florentine, which portrays a culturally-mixed, queer Tel Aviv, were only superficially transgressive: “As borders become penetrable in new ways, dominant Jewish Israeli popular culture has sought to defend the cultural integrity of Israel, to shore up its Jewishness and to preserve the fantasy of a Euro-Jewish nation-state”.Footnote ³⁴ Ted Swedenburg was similarly pessimistic about the incorporation of Arab “world music” into American popular culture, as iconized by Cheb Mami singing with Sting at the 2001 Super Bowl halftime show at the Super Bowl, appreciation for Arab culture – properly placed, within the framework of Anglo-American rock ‘n’ roll – meshed perfectly with a celebration of U.S. military might and the war against Iraq. The increasing presence of Arabs on the U.S. music scene can be an opportunity, but if not aligned to active politics, it can easily be put to other, more regressive, purposes.Footnote ³⁵

In general, contributors to the 2001 “Culture and Politics” special issue tended to present the former as ultimately in the service of the latter, situating culture aesthetic within the domain of hegemony.

Indeed, over the years MERIP authors came to pay increasing attention to the various state institutions and corporate industries that profit from culture, domesticate it, and continually re-draw the boundaries between its ostensibly “high” and “popular” forms. Samia Mehrez, in her lead piece for the “Culture and Politics” issue, highlighted the entanglement of the Egyptian cultural and political “fields.” She wrote that if, in general, “the cultural is the handmaiden of the political,” in postcolonial Egypt “the political needs the cultural as the most important icon of its claim to be modern.”Footnote ³⁶ She traces how Egyptian cultural producers navigated the shifting tides of the Ministry of Culture, the Department of State Security, and a resurgent Muslim Brotherhood in the wake of the accusation of blasphemy against the editors re-issuing Syrian writer Haydar Haydar's 1983 novel, A Banquet for Seaweed.

The 2012 special issue on “The Art and Culture of the Arab Revolts” tended to strike a similar note, implicitly responding to the unbridled mainstream enthusiasm for the thawra as a victory of the “people” over the regime. Like Mehrez, Sonali Pahwa and Jessica Winegar emphasized in their lead article the crucial function of ministries of culture for Arab artists and writers who make common cause with regimes they may despise in order to access funding, professional legitimacy, and cultural authority.Footnote ³⁷ While John Schaefer and Shayna Silverstein detailed the ways in which gnawa song and dabka dance gained new radical meaning in Moroccan and Syrian protests,Footnote ³⁸ other contributors to the volume underlined the processes by which the Moroccan state has historically “festivalize[d] dissent,”Footnote ³⁹ or how Gulf states took over from a disintegrating Iraq in funding and regulating the world of legitimate Arab art.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nada Shabout would go on to detail the urban revitalization efforts around the naming of Baghdad as the 2013 Arab Capital of Culture, which she characterized as a “systematic destruction of identity and erasure of national memory” and part of a “larger policy of denationalizing Iraqi history.”Footnote ⁴¹ Other authors critically examined how states build and destroy monuments and museums in attempts to master inconvenient and uncontrollable histories of pluralism, political prosecution, and slavery.Footnote ⁴²

To approach culture as “the handmaiden of the political” does, however, do a great disservice to the writers, artists, musicians, and performers who are often dependent of ministry funding and corporate sponsorship, and also subject to state censorship and all-too-often legal prosecution; their lives and creative work are not contained by the state or market. While, with Mehrez who draws on Pierre Bourdieu, we might recognize that artistic autonomy is itself a historical object of symbolic struggle within overlapping fields of capital,Footnote ⁴³ that struggle does not define the artistic work or the artist. Indeed, one of the central struggles within MERIP – as well as the broader field of Middle East Studies – has been to carve out intellectual spaces for culture to be taken seriously on its own terms, in all of its polysemy, aesthetic complexity, and political contradictions. Elliott Colla insisted on precisely this dimension of aesthetic culture in his critical reviews of instrumental artists like Lebanese composer Marcel Khalife or Iraqi oudist Nasser Shamma who, in their experimental formalism, defy categories of “symphonic” and “popular” music and whose political intervention comes more from the performance context than the musical form or content.Footnote ⁴⁴

Colla's concerns echo earlier caveats by MERIP authors and artists. Miriam Rosen recalled a 1970s forum on Palestinian cultural resistance where an audience member asked what relevance the cultural artifacts discussed by panelists had to the Palestinian proletariat. Kamal Boulatta responded that Picasso's experiments with Cubism did not directly reflect workers’ experience, but they did change how, ever since, people have seen the world, and so were truly revolutionary.Footnote ⁴⁵ In a later piece about political sloganeering in Tahrir Square, published in the “Art and Culture of the Arab Revolts” special issue, Colla would similarly underline this productive dimension of the aesthetic. Insisting on protest slogans as constituting a poetic, metrical, intertextual repertoire, he pointed to their particular performances as a contextualized “locutionary event.” “The people” (al-sha'b) commonly invoked in chanted slogans functioned both metaphorically and non-metaphorically, as both a symbolic proposition and a performative utterance that calls forth the protesting crowd as a nation-to-be. Any cultural analysis must take into account this “play of action and language” involved in all forms of aesthetic expression, which situates them as an important constituent of the political, but not wholly determined by it.Footnote ⁴⁶

Culture in the Plural

Colla's vision presents a considerable challenge for a progressive project like MERIP, historically committed to the radical reporting on regional current events and critical analysis of imperial violence and foreign military interventions, and also domestic injustice and inequality in the Middle East and North Africa. The immediacy of events and the intensity of suffering exerts a significant pull on editorial planning for every issue, with authors and editors hearing the activist voice in the back of their minds demanding how their writing furthers the cause of peace and social justice. Such a pull of the political (economic) has been felt all the more acutely over the last two decades at the precise moment that technological innovation and a burgeoning diaspora has underwritten the accelerated circulation of Middle Eastern and North African cultural media across Europe and North America. To a great extent, the “Culture” page of Jadaliyya sought to provide precisely such a virtual, multimedia, multilingual space to elevate writers and artists from the region whose voices were less audible and works less visible within the strictures of MERIP's reporting. And it is perhaps not surprising that those efforts were largely founded and animated by a younger generation of MERIP veterans like Bassam Haddad, Sinan Antoon, and Elliott Colla who recognized MERIP's limitations. Of course, Jadaliyya's decentralized and heterogeneous format presents its own limitations, and it is precisely MERIP's highly curated, carefully edited, and intellectually centered structure which provides its overall strength. Under the direction of Waleed Hazbun and Michelle Woodward, cultural reviews have once again become a regular feature of MERIP coverage, and the recent publishing of Wedeen's translations of Osama Esber's poetry bodes well for aesthetic works, in both translation and Arabic, being given renewed attention as exemplifying and contributing to the broader social dynamics in the region.

Aesthetic works are, of course, but one dimension of the work of “culture” as an important counterpoint to MERIP's dominant political economic motif. While MERIP has only rarely published classical, village-level ethnographic pieces – mostly retrospective accounts, sometimes upon returns to prior field sites after momentous changesFootnote ⁴⁷ – part of the power of the magazine's reporting has involved giving a feel for the everyday lived experiences of people confronting existential challenges. By elevating ordinary lives, MERIP authors and editors have offered a riposte to the essentialism and exceptionalism of Orientalist scholarship. For example, Jessica Winegar's beautiful 2011 set piece, “Taking Out the Trash,” portrays the mundanity of carework within the revolutionary ferment of Tahrir Square.Footnote ⁴⁸ Various ethnographic essays by Lila Abu-Lughod, Ahmad Beydoun, Hannah Davis, and others provide a sense of affective phenomenology of a place and a moment, their structure of feeling, as Raymond Williams would call it.Footnote ⁴⁹ While varied in content and perspective, MERIP's occasional series of diary entries, letters, reports, and “dispatches” from various locales in the region go beyond journalistic reportage to chronicle the mood of a place and its inhabitants.Footnote ⁵⁰ Indeed, several issues have been devoted precisely to such shorter narratives about how major world events are lived on highly local scales, including a 2006 special issue on mid-war Iraq, “Dispatches from the War Zones,” featuring a path-breaking article on “Women in Iraq” by Nicola Pratt and Nadje Al-‘AliFootnote ⁵¹ and an original collection of “Columns” from Iraqi newspapers translated by Sinan Antoon; as well as a long, multi-country special section on “Dispatches on Trumpland” edited by Alex Lubin for the 2017 “America First 2.0” issue.

Finally, several essays over the years have reflected on the very process of field research and cross-cultural communication, how human connections and self-making can and does occur across these divides in often unexpected ways that defy the ostensible research goals.Footnote ⁵² While anthropologists of the Middle East (and particularly Morocco) – including Vincent Crapanzano, Kevin Dwyer, Michael M.J. Fischer, Paul Rabinow, and later Stefania Pandolfo – famously elaborated from Geertzian interpretive anthropology to reflect and innovate on ethnographic form,Footnote ⁵³ such poststructuralist and postmodern experiments have been relatively rare in the magazine given the dominant neo-realist ethnographic aesthetic of MERIP – as well as of much of Middle Eastern anthropology – in the last several decades, and given the activist priority for centering the struggles of people over the meta-struggles of the ethnographer to represent them. If anything, even more pieces which situate the political economic phenomena reported in the magazine in the lived, everyday, affective worlds of ordinary people will only further MERIP's ethico-political mission.

Intersectional Identities

Alongside culture aesthetic and culture ethnographic, MERIP has also presented culture as identity performance in diverse ways that can be even more productively amplified moving forward. In the first place, MERIP has had a strong record of covering Middle Eastern women's lives, issues, and struggles. In its early years, MERIP's focus was on the intersection of gender and class, inspired by the groundbreaking historical work of MERIP foremother Judith Tucker, with the particular exploitation of female labor highlighted in special issues on “Arab Women Workers” (1976), “Egypt's Working Women” (1979), and “Women and Labor Migration” (1984), the latter of which focused on the village-level transformations of women's lives in rural Egypt and Yemen in the context of the growth of a remittance economy.Footnote ⁵⁴ However, in the years which followed, MERIP's attention shifted to women as creative political actors struggling within contexts of expanding state and religious patriarchy, with special issues on “Women and Politics in the Middle East” (1986), “Gender Politics” (1991), and “Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East” (1996), the first and third under the direction of Suad Joseph, and the second put together by Barbara Harlow and Julie Peteet, with important contributions from MERIP stalwarts Sheila Carapico, Sarah Graham-Brown, Sondra Hale, Homa Hoodfar, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Jenny White, among others.Footnote ⁵⁵ In a 1993 interview with Joe Stork, Suad Joseph would articulate the cardinal feminist intervention within MERIP and Middle East studies: “Gender difference is historically and culturally constructed through complex moralities, idioms and structures of power. Feminist discourse attempts to destabilize the hegemony of these constructs and by so doing create spaces for experiments in alternate forms of relationships.” She went on to situate gender within a broader intersectional field of identity performance and politics: “persons are deeply embedded in communities, in families, in ethnic, racial or other social groupings. . . . Class, race, patriarchy, and other forms of exclusion are still operating.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Under the aegis of late MERIP executive editor Geoff Hartman, MERIP authors – including Yael Ben-zvi, Bruce Dunne, Deniz Kandiyoti, and Garay Menicucci – would similarly address parallel marginalized experiences and struggles of homosexual, transsexual, and queer Middle Easterners, particularly in special issues on “Power and Sexuality in the Middle East” (1998) and later “Sexuality, Suppression, and the State” (2004).

Intersectional identities as cultural performances are even more clearly evident in MERIP's engaged discussions of ethnicity and (belatedly) race. The magazine has consistently covered Kurdish struggles for cultural autonomy and political sovereignty in Iran, Iraq, and Turkey from 1974 forward, particularly through the frequent contributions of Martin van Bruinessen,Footnote ⁵⁷ and more recently in three special issues: “The Kurdish Experience” (1994), “The Kurds and the Future” (1998), and “Kurdistan, One and Many” (2020). Early and robust attention was also given to the struggles of Palestinian and Mizrahi Israelis (e.g., the 1971 coverage of the “Israeli Black Panthers” and the 1975 special issue on “Arabs in Israel”), Lebanese Shi'a (1985 special issue), and more recently Berber/Amazigh,Footnote ⁵⁸ Druze,Footnote ⁵⁹ Alevi,Footnote ⁶⁰ and CopticFootnote ⁶¹ fights for rights, recognition, and resources. More generally, the history and politics of sectarianism and communalism were investigated in special issues on “Minorities in the Middle East” (1996) and “Fragments of the State” (2005), with key essays by Ussama Makdisi and Vickie Langohr.Footnote ⁶²

While MERIP has been less consistent in addressing racial projects and processes of racialization within the region, early articles on the Black Panthers (1971) and Black Hebrews in IsraelFootnote ⁶³ were followed by important works by Hisham Aidi, Moustafa Bayoumi, Andy Clarno, Salah Hassan, and S.A. Smythe,Footnote ⁶⁴ as well as the recently released issue on “Race – Legacies and Challenges” (2021) that explores racial formations in the Gulf, Iran, Lebanon, Palestine, Tunisia, and Turkey. These interventions complement the previous work focused mostly on the diaspora, which likewise transitioned from primarily political-economic analyses of labor migration (including special issues in 1984 and 1985) to cultural studies of transnational mediaFootnote ⁶⁵ and ethnographies of racial/religious discrimination during the war on terror.Footnote ⁶⁶ Culture, in these intersectional studies, denotes a field of struggle over the boundaries of subjectivity, authenticity, civil rights, and material resources in the face of state discrimination and communal violence.

Categories and Commitments

Presenting culture as a field of struggle builds on Timothy Mitchell's earlier insistence on the intertwining – indeed co-constitution – of the symbolic and the material. In his path-breaking Middle East Report essay, “America's Egypt” (1991) – an essay that in many ways anticipates his later Rule of Experts – Mitchell traces a genealogy of the development industry and the bourgeois political economy that underwrites it. Opening with the trope of a World Bank geographic description of Egypt, he insists, in Foucauldian fashion, that “Objects of analysis do not occur as natural phenomena, but are partly constructed by the discourse that describes them.” There is nothing self-evident about “Egypt” as a site for social scientific study and developmental intervention; its self-evidence as a country is the outcome of an iterative discursive process. “The strictly ‘national’ identity of a population, an economy, a language or a culture is an entity that has to be continually reinvented against the force of. . . transnational relations and movements.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Culture, in other words, always comes to be in a particular regime of knowledge and power in which the development expert, ethnographer, and critical Middle Eastern scholar are inevitably entangled. Our categories of description and models of analysis can never be dispassionate; indeed, it is their passions that provide their critical force. Various MERIP writers over the years have made such a poststructuralist point, particularly in special issues critical of global health regimes, including on “Health and Politics” (1989) and, more recently, “Health and the Body Politic” (2020). But, as Joel Beinin would insist, such a deconstructive critique cannot be the end point, but merely a step toward refining our understanding, building broader coalitions, and effectuating more inclusive social and political change. “Understanding that our categories of analysis are not unmediated reflections of social reality should not deter us from deploying as many of those categories as possible.”Footnote ⁶⁸ At the end of the day, culture cannot but be political, inevitably framed, as it is, by struggles over the production and distribution of material and symbolic resources. Still culture is never only political. To engage culture seriously on its own terms – with all its playfulness, ambiguities, affective intensities, everyday practices, performative effects, and, yes, political economy – remains an ongoing challenge for MERIP and critical Middle East studies as they strive to contribute radically to the academic and activist struggles for peace and social justice in the region.