Results by title
60 books match the query 'Middle Eastern Studies' and 4 start with d
Deadly Refusals
Kurdish Decolonization in Times of CounterterrorismSerra M. Hakyemez
University of Minnesota Press, 2026
Revolutionary desire and decolonial struggle inside the heart of the carceral state
Deadly Refusals offers an intimate portrait of Kurdish decolonial struggle within the carceral and legal apparatuses of the Turkish state. Set in the counterterrorism courts and maximum-security prisons of Northern Kurdistan, Serra M. Hakyemez’s ethnography examines how prosecuted and imprisoned Kurds from different socioeconomic backgrounds organize in refusal of the criminalization and colonization of their political demands and desires. Through acts of self-criticism, revolutionary education, and comradely care, these prisoners articulate a political subjectivity that challenges the foundations of colonial power.
Based on more than seventeen years of ethnographic research—including interviews with former prisoners, lawyers, judges, and prosecutors; observations of more than one hundred court hearings; and analysis of prison memoirs, poetry, and legal archives—Deadly Refusals uncovers the mechanisms through which counterterrorism law reproduces the colonial state. Yet it is not solely a study of repression. Engaging psychoanalytic concepts of subject, desire, and ethics, Hakyemez illuminates how these carceral spaces also become sites of revolutionary responsibility. Here, refusal is not resignation but a political act in which the colonized self is killed—literally or figuratively—to make way for a larger collective subjectivity.
Using the interplay of comradeship and intimacy, political desire and ordinary pleasure, death and love, Deadly Refusals examines how Kurdish political prisoners forge multilayered relations of decolonization in an ongoing psychopolitical struggle. Hakyemez shows how both small gestures of withdrawal, restraint, and negation as well as radical acts like language protests, hunger strikes, and death protests become part of a shared struggle for alternative futures that state power cannot fully contain or comprehend.
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Decolonizing Afghanistan
Countering Imperial Knowledge and PowerWazhmah Osman and Robert D. Crews, editors
Duke University Press, 2025
Contributors. Matthieu Aikins, Dawood Azami, Purnima Bose, Paula Chakravartty, Robert D. Crews, Marya Hannun, Ali Karimi, Nivi Manchanda, Sabauon Nasseri, Tausif Noor, Wazhmah Osman, Hosai Qasmi, Zohra Saed, Gazelle Samizay, Morwari Zafar, Helena Zeweri
Displacing Territory
Syrian and Palestinian Refugees in JordanKaren Culcasi
University of Chicago Press, 2023
Based on fieldwork with Palestinian and Syrian refugees in Jordan, Displacing Territory explores how the lived realities of refugees are deeply affected by their imaginings of what constitutes territory and their sense of belonging to different places and territories. Karen Culcasi shows how these individual conceptualizations about territory don’t always fit the Western-centric division of the world into states and territories, thus revealing alternative or subordinated forms and scales of territory. She also argues that disproportionate attention to “refugee crises” in the Global North has diverted focus from other parts of the world that bear the responsibility of protecting the majority of the world’s refugees. By focusing on Jordan, a Global South state that hosts the world’s second-largest number of refugees per capita, this book provides insights to consider alternate ways to handle the situation of refugees elsewhere. In the process, Culcasi brings the reader into refugees’ diverse realities through their own words, inherently arguing against the tendency of many people in the Global North to see refugees as aberrant, burdensome, or threatening.
Doomed by Hope
Essays on Arab TheatreEdited by Eyad Houssami and Elias Khoury
Pluto Press, 2012
Doomed by Hope is a beautifully presented collection of essays by writers and artists which traces the history of contemporary Arab theatre and its relationship to social change.
With contributors from Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Palestine, Kuwait and Yemen, this book includes both academic discussions and personal narratives, alongside a number of specially commissioned portraits of contemporary Arab theatre artists. The essays revolve around the legacy of the late Syrian dramatist Saadallah Wannous, whose monumental plays incited audiences to rise up against tyranny decades ago.
This unique book is one of the first English language volumes on Arab theatre. In a highly topical manner following the Arab Spring, it explores cultural practices – from reading plays in a classroom to performing in a security state and directing in theatres, prisons, and international festivals – in times of revolt.