|
Sort Order |
|
|
|
Items / Page
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Srl | Item |
1 |
ID:
181051
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
The aim of this article is to highlight the strategic importance of Yemen during the cold war in a way that shows its impact on the balance of power during the era of American imperialism that persists to this day. After World War II, the countries that had interests in the country were the Soviet Union, the United States, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt (and to a lesser degree, France, Great Britain, China). This article focuses specifically on a decisive war implicating Yemen and these powers: the North Yemen war of 1962-68. Exploring this war from a multi-level class perspective can clarify the historical context necessary to understand the geostrategic importance of Yemen in the strengthening of American hegemony vis-à-vis the Soviet Union, and at the regional level, of Saudi Arabia vis-à-vis its Soviet-allied competitor: Egypt. I argue that the 1962-1968 war in North Yemen shifted the balance of power in region and contributed to the strengthening of American imperialism and to the defeat of Arab socialism. The weight and the impact of this major shift in the balance of power still burdens Yemen today. The United States, in the face of new competitors such as Iran and China, still needs to have a stronghold on Yemen to maintain its world hegemony.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
2 |
ID:
181053
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
This article explores a unique type of songs performed by a Black minority musical group in southeastern Tunisia. Taifa, a group of Black singers, mainly from the rural working class appeared as a response to the economic marginalization of Blacks after the abolition of slavery in Tunisia in 1846. It explores the way this musical group developed and how it came to be associated with the norms of respectability among the local society. It also delves into the themes of Taifa songs that, I contend, show an incremental journey of integration into the predominant Arab/Berber majority and an adjustment to Tunisia’s social and political changes, which were reflected in the changes in the themes of Taifa songs after the Tunisian Revolution.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
3 |
ID:
181052
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
Thinking theoretically about three important and recent events affecting the Kurds can help us to understand better their political experiences.1 These events include (1) The breakdown of the Turkish Government-Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) cease-fire in July 2015; (2) the failure of the advisory referendum on independence that the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq held on September 25, 2017; and (3) the Turkish military incursion into northeastern Syria (Rojava or Syrian Kurdistan) in October 2019. I first examine five different theories of international relations as well as the concept of levels of analysis and theories of nationalism. In doing so, I refer intermittently to these three important recent events concerning the Kurds and then describe them more fully to illustrate how thinking theoretically can help explain what happened and why.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
4 |
ID:
181049
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
A Land Like You, Tobie Nathan’s scrupulously researched yet wildly imaginative historical novel of early twentieth-century Cairo offers an extended exploration of what it means to be both Jewish and Egyptian, even as it chronicles the rise of the competing nationalisms that led to the dispersal of Egypt’s Jews. Unlike most Egyptian Jewish novelists and memoirists, Nathan claims Cairo’s Haret al-Yahud, where the city’s poorest, indigenous Jews lived from time immemorial, as his ‘source,’ and indeed the source for all of Egypt’s Jews—the ‘spring one drinks at every day.’ This source arises from the Egyptian land and the ancient spirits that govern it, to which the exiled writer remains inextricably bound, symbolized in the novel through the irresistible love that links the Jewish narrator to his Muslim ‘milk-sister.’ For Nathan’s French-to-English translator, herself an Egyptian Jew, the novel offers a return to her own Arab-Jewish source, which, like Nathan, she seeks to cultivate so that it may nurture others.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
5 |
ID:
181050
|
|
|
Summary/Abstract |
The libraries at top private and public research universities in the United States hold some of the most comprehensive collections in the world for studying other regions and their modern histories. Yet how this came to be has been largely overlooked. This article unearths the history of the Public Law 480 Program, also known as Food For Peace or PL-480, and how it came to support the large-scale acquisition of Arabic books through a center opened for this purpose in Cairo, Egypt. The article explores the changes in US food exports, specifically wheat, and links these changes to PL-480, US foreign policy, and finally Arabic book acquisitions for US research libraries. By drawing on a variety of publicly available primary sources, as well as a series of interviews with the current and former directors of the Cairo acquisitions center, this article lays out the history of this unorthodox program and its outsized impact on area studies programs in the United States, with a specific focus on Middle East Studies.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|