Although it is true that students and scholars of the Middle East can find many first-rate monographs on their subject, a compendium has historically been lacking. The answer to this absence is Anna Ball and Karim Mattar’s Companion; and upon it the highest praise should be conferred. Expertly edited and inspiringly ambitious, their book furnishes the reader with a near inexhaustible set of critical tools with which to approach this rich and complex subject. The word companion, in this instance, could not be more appropriately assigned.
The book’s introduction usefully parses the relevant histories of the field before opening with several chapters that set the tone for the text as a whole, partly by addressing tensions that arise from its pioneering scope. Karim Mattar returns to Edward Said’s ambivalence toward postcolonialism; Waїl S. Hassan makes predictions about the field’s future; and two interviews—with high-profile writers Ahdaf Soueif and Sinan Antoon—provide an educative preamble, settling the reader into this particular intellectual vernacular. This book begins—and remains—preoccupied with categories throughout. What exactly the “Middle East” stands for, and what the similarly contested term postcolonial has to do with it, are questions underpinning the whole text. The variety of answers this companion offers is testament to how productive a debate about these categories can be.
The companion is split into three sections, focusing on the colonial encounter, states of post/coloniality, and the post/colonial present. This tripartite structure neatly delineates discourses of imperialism, politics and identity, and engagement in a global context, respectively. Highlights include: Juan R. I. Cole’s delicate clarification of our conception of the subaltern, differentiating a semi-autonomous low-end bourgeoisie from an overlooked peasantry; Lindsey Moore’s inspection of the queerness of textuality and/as translation, for which a pedagogical setting exemplifies the kind of praxis the companion might subsequently benefit; Erdağ Göknar’s deft textual appraisals, situating Orhan Pamuk’s place in the Middle Eastern canon as crucial to understanding the political and religious dialectic ever-unfolding in Turkey; and miriam cooke’s artful take on the Syrian revolution, which includes a revelatory introduction to the mixed media art of Tammam ‘Azzam, as well as a nuanced critique of the internet’s role in the so-called “Arab Spring.” Through this brief overview alone, one gains a sense of the breadth and scope of this fascinating book.
A chapter worth special mention is Ella Shohat’s genealogy of the split Arab/Jew figure. Dismantling the commonplace notion that the relationship between Jews and Muslims has been one characterized by antagonism, Shohat takes a historical path through the art of European empire, describing, among other things, the othering of Jews by Christianity, the de-Orientalization of Jewishness by Zionism, and how ways in which sanitizing the figure of the Jew led to a rupture from Arabness, thereby enabling an imperial modus operandi of divide and rule. Paying close attention to the story of Sol, a Jewish girl executed in Fez in 1834 for alleged Islamic apostasy, Shohat traces the European representations of her fate, which tend to imagine the moment as evidence of the aforementioned antagonism, alongside the concurrent veneration of her by both Jewish and Arab people. “Thus,” she writes:
Despite the Jewish/Muslim chasm connoted by the momentous death sentence, the Hebrew narrative corresponds to the historically shared Jewish and Muslim understanding of societal organisation, in which communal designation as premised on religious affiliation was itself shaped by vital inter-communal intersections across overlapping cultural universes. (147)
What Shohat recalls here is a Judeo-Muslim syncretism that successfully—and in captivating style—problematizes the Judeo-Christian cultural hegemony.
The Middle East remains understudied and under-theorized. This book aims to address this lacuna by gathering some of the world’s foremost postcolonialists to develop new critical, theoretical, and disciplinary axes. By gathering these thinkers together, Ball and Mattar uncover a rich seam of scholarly debate and thought that both enhances our understanding of what can be an overwhelmingly complex sociopolitical milieu and reinvigorates the postcolonial field confirming its critical power in elucidating the enduring impact of colonial and imperial interference on the region.
