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60 books match the query 'Middle Eastern Studies' and 4 start with s

cover of Searching for Solidarity: Revolutionary Dreams and Radical Social Movements

Searching for Solidarity

Revolutionary Dreams and Radical Social Movements

Noor Ghazal Aswad

The Ohio State University Press, 2025

In Searching for Solidarity, Noor Ghazal Aswad explores how the emancipatory qualities of transnational revolutionary struggle are often denied, misunderstood, and erased. Drawing on the stories of those in struggle, Searching for Solidarity reimagines solidarity as an affective, ethical, and political capacity that can thrive amid today’s volatile “political economy of emotion”—an environment marked by mistrust, fake news, and disinformation campaigns targeting those in resistance. At the heart of this book is the “radical subject,” which refers to those revolting against repressive forces to achieve liberatory change at the risk of death, injury, or disappearance. These radical subjects offer a new foundation for critical theory—one that rejects “negative solidarity,” the tendency to acquiesce to power or distance oneself from those fighting against systemic injustice. By immersing readers in the testimony, memory, and hopes of these subjects, each chapter reveals solidarity as an affective force capable of cutting through distortive narratives and binding us in a cross-cultural, decolonizing, and nonhierarchical collectivity. Solidarity, through this lens, emerges as a transformative stance that compels us to, as Yassin al-Haj Saleh writes, become “partners in word and deed to change power.”
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cover of Shelter for the Night: On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Shelter for the Night

On Afghanistan, Language, and Detours

Fatima Mojaddedi

Duke University Press, 2026

Shelter for the Night is an ethnographic meditation on language and psychic life in 2010s Afghanistan, where militarized violence has collapsed social worlds. Across Kabul and the countryside, in poetic and probing style, the book unpacks the precarious relationship between language, violence, and the self. As social and political worlds fracture through militarized violence, economic speculation, interpersonal sabotage, and ruptures in shared understanding, people are set on unexpected detours to discontinuity. Encounters in political life, love, and translation become fragmented, difficult to parse, and entangled in symbolic violence. Yet amid the harsh realities of contemporary life in Kabul, Fatima Mojaddedi finds moments of wonder and rich inner lives of reflexivity, understanding, and social connection. From narratives of modernist ambition and political violence to tragic romance and urbanite translators and their rural interlocutors, Shelter for the Night looks at the challenges of articulating the unspeakable to make a bold claim for the importance of thinking about the contemporary world starting from Afghanistan.
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cover of Social Media Tribes: Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State

Social Media Tribes

Jordan's Bedouin and the Margins of the State

Geoffrey F. Hughes

University of Texas Press, 2026

An examination of the uses of social media in Jordan through the experiences of Bedouin tribespeople.

It has become something of a cliché to say that social media is making us tribal. But what do self-styled tribespeople themselves think about social media, and how might they help us better understand the role of the internet in our current political moment? Drawing on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork among Bedouin in Jordan, Social Media Tribes underscores the varied but broadly intelligible ways in which distinctive groups domesticate social media to suit their needs.

Organized around key concepts in Bedouin life (including tribalism, envy, and mercy), Social Media Tribes moves between Facebook-mediated tribal truces, upstart online media platforms, palatial urban villas where self-appointed sheikhs dispense justice, and street clashes organized over WhatsApp in rural communities ignored by state development projects. A meticulous researcher and insightful participant-observer, Geoffrey Hughes reframes social media as part of a global renegotiation of the state-society divide that both preceded the emergence of social media platforms and, in turn, feeds off of them. In this telling, the internet represents a new frontier that, like older frontiers, heralds both novel freedoms and novel forms of social control.

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cover of Streets of a Million Martyrs: Everyday Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria

Streets of a Million Martyrs

Everyday Poetics and Politics in Urban Algeria

Stephanie Love

University of Chicago Press, 0

Follows ordinary people as they move through the Algerian city of Oran, navigating the politically charged context of postcolonialism.

In this book, anthropologist Stephanie Love examines ordinary Algerians’ hope for a better future through what she calls “everyday urban poetics,” focusing on the country’s second-largest city of Oran. Examining linguistic forms including placenames, jokes, metaphors, anecdotes, and code-switches along with urban forms including monuments, buildings, and street layouts, Love shows how popular imaginaries of resistance are inscribed in Oran’s language and cityscapes.

Love argues that these everyday urban poetics constitute a street-based language that has helped Algerians find ways around oppressive censorship, reckon with painful pasts, and develop what she views as a politically fertile creative insurgency. This is particularly true in the wake of the 2019 uprising known as Hirak (“the movement”) that found Algerians challenging the legitimacy of the postcolonial regime through large-scale demonstrations and protests. Analyzing phenomena as diverse as efforts to preserve buildings and monuments, the informal renaming of streets and landmarks, and the development of women-led associations encouraging education and open discourse, Love shows how new forms of political life can be developed and sharpened in everyday speech.

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