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"DI-CAPUA, YOAV"
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Gatekeepers of the Arab Past
This groundbreaking study illuminates the Egyptian experience of modernity by critically analyzing the foremost medium through which it was articulated: history. The first comprehensive analysis of a Middle Eastern intellectual tradition, Gatekeepers of the Past examines a system of knowledge that replaced the intellectual and methodological conventions of Islamic historiography only at the very end of the nineteenth century. Covering more than one hundred years of mostly unexamined historucal literature in Arabic, Yoav Di-Capua explores Egyptian historical thought, examines the careers of numerous critical historians, and traces this tradition's uneasy relationship with colonial forms of knowledge as well as with the post-colonial state.
eBook
Arab Existentialism: An Invisible Chapter in the Intellectual History of Decolonization
The emergence of Arab existentialism as a major category of Arab thought coincided with the worldwide process of decolonization and the rise of the first generation of Third World regimes. Between the end of World War II, when pro-colonial Arab monarchies teetered, and the 1967 Six-Day War, when the revolutionary Arab states that had replaced the monarchies were defeated, a young generation of Arab intellectuals employed variants of existentialism in order to meet the multiple challenges of decolonization: cultural contradictions, uneven development and the consequent social injustice, a struggle for full physical liberation, and the derivative search for an alternative Cold War political space. Here, Di-Capua looks at the emergence of Arab existentialism as a major category of Arab thought.
Journal Article
Why Decolonization?
Engaging new source material, the contributors collectively help to look at modern MENA history from a new angle, seeing it not as an insulated collection of distinct state/country projects but as a field embedded in multiple, contrasting, even contradictory ways in the world. They show how decolonization was a global process characterized by the building of multilingual and transnational webs of practices and meanings. The study of decolonization, their texts imply, offers MENA historians ample possibilities to investigate the history of “their” region against African, Asian and Euro-American contexts—in line with the post-Cold War historiographical shift toward transnationalism.
Journal Article
Palestine Comes to Paris: The Global Sixties and the Making of a Universal Cause
In the early 1960s, Israeli diplomats based in Paris noted that student life there had become political in new ways that threatened to undermine Israel's image and standing in the public mind. In an effort to understand the growing international student body and its nine thousand well-integrated Arab students, the embassy asked Israeli students to spy on their colleagues and submit detailed reports about their political associations, thoughts, opinions, connections, whereabouts, and much else. Using the reports and other auxiliary material that the Israeli diplomats collected, this article examines the formation process of a unique, student-led intellectual and political ecosystem. Specifically, it shows how, in tandem with the rise of the New Arab Left and other transnational student collaborations, the Palestinian question grew from a marginal and marginalized issue to a major cause that was deeply entwined with other contemporaneous causes of universal resonance, such as those of South Africa, Rhodesia, and Algeria.
Journal Article
HAUNTED: ON THE NEW ARABIC TRANSLATION OF SARTRE'S ANTI-SEMITE AND JEW
Two years ago, without any apparent explanation, a little-known Egyptian scholar translated Jean-Paul Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew (originally published as Réflexions sur la Question Juive , 1946) into Arabic. Widely acknowledged as an experimental and highly influential theory of anti-Semitism in the 1960s, Sartre's text had already had a profound, yet indirect, influence on an entire class of left-wing Arab intellectuals who used it in order to figure out their relationship with the colonizer; that is, with their Otherness. Though these intellectuals read Anti-Semite and Jew in French, it still remained one of Sartre's very few works that had never been translated into Arabic. How so? Addressing this question, this article offers a genealogy of non-translation that revisits the accumulative process by which Sartre's text acquired the status of a haunted and, hence, untranslatable text. Situated at the juncture where anti-Semitism, Zionism, and revolutionary Arab politics intersect, the text became entangled in the ethical politics of the conflict and, after the 1967 war, became associated with the collapse of the Arab revolutionary project and with Sartre's betrayal of the Arab cause. Thereafter, the work of leftist intellectuals who had drawn on Sartre to reject anti-Semitism was forgotten, and an anti-Semitic sentiment that rejects the original message of Anti-Semite and Jew slowly settled in. Beyond dissecting the process by which a text becomes haunted, this article also states the need for an original theorization of anti-Semitism that is culturally specific to the Arab world rather than derivative of European experience.
Journal Article
Trauma and Other Historians
If one practical way to define trauma is to consider it as a chronic inability to access and process catastrophic events, that is, as a systematic and haunting blockage of memory formation and reclamation of past experiences, then historians have an inherent stake in the concept. This basic observation is not new, of course, but until now only historians of the Holocaust have evinced serious and consistent interest in the vast literature on Trauma Studies. Most historians—for example those who work with the distant past, with non-Western societies, or with less extreme historical events—have not had to engage with the historical implications of trauma. In as much as historians use the term, they do so from the lay standpoint that considers trauma as a horrible and tragic man-made event or a natural disaster. In its popular and very elastic usage the event (trauma) and its consequences (always “traumatic”) run the risk of remaining unexplored and largely unexplained, and thus, paradoxically, actually traumatic in the sense of not allowing access to the past. While remaining cognizant of the bland usage of the concept of trauma, the goal of this special issue is to offer a modest commentary on what Trauma Studies can offer to “Other Historians” and, perhaps, on what they can offer in return. The work presented here is of a provisional nature and is the product of a year-long seminar by a diverse group of historians at the Institute of Historical Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and the international conference, “Trauma and History,” that they organized.
Journal Article