Suchergebnisse

In Barbara Harlow's last works, there was a distinctive methodological shift as she confronted the new realities of the post-9/11 world. The implications of this methodological movement are explored in this article through a reading of the history of the Yemeni city of Aden. Aden's history – as a protectorate, an Arabic-speaking port, a virtual city-state and a link to East Africa – suggests the ways in which historical particularity often fits the colonial discourse paradigm imperfectly. Aden also later became a centre of radical anti-colonial solidarity in the 1970s, a centre of extreme jihadi activity during the war on terror and, most recently, a site of catastrophe manufactured by global elites. This historical trajectory also calls for a critical accounting of new methods and approaches for addressing the inequalities of the contemporary global order.

Near the beginning of his classic work of historiography,The History of the Maghrib: An Interpretive Essay, Moroccan thinker Abdallah Laroui inserts a footnote about a study of the region by a Harvard-based American author who refers to North Africa as "no idea producing area," a statement that Laroui thoroughly dismantles in a couple of sentences. In this short note at the start of a book written forty years ago, Laroui pinpoints the central problem in U.S.-based studies of the Arab region. The historically contested nature of knowledge production in the field cannot be ignored in any attempt to address the question of critical theory's influence on Arabic literature in the American academy.