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Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle...
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Music Books > Arab Strap > Item 6
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Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle...
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by Keith David Watenpaugh
Sales Rank: 429675
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List Price: $37.95
$32.60
At Amazon
on 12-29-2007.
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Features
Hardcover: 344 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press March 27, 2006
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0691121699
ISBN-13: 978-0691121697
Product Dimensions:
9.3 x 6.2 x 1.4 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
Product Review
Sherene Seikaly Arab Studies Journal : Keith David Watenpaugh has broken ground with this study of the middle class in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Aleppo.
Uri Ram Middle East Journal : Refreshing. . . . A superb work of cultural, political, and social history.
Donald Malcolm Reid International History Review : Will benefit both Middle East specialists and others who wrestle with themes of nation, empire, minorities, and modernity.
Book Description
In this innovative book, Keith Watenpaugh connects the question of modernity to the formation of the Arab middle class. The book explores the rise of a middle class of liberal professionals, white-collar employees, journalists, and businessmen during the first decades of the twentieth century in the Arab Middle East and the ways its members created civil society, and new forms of politics, bodies of thought, and styles of engagement with colonialism.
Discussions of the middle class have been largely absent from historical writings about the Middle East. Watenpaugh fills this lacuna by drawing on Arab, Ottoman, British, American and French sources and an eclectic body of theoretical literature and shows that within the crucible of the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, World War I, and the advent of late European colonialism, a discrete middle class took shape. It was defined not just by the wealth, professions, possessions, or the levels of education of its members, but also by the way they asserted their modernity.
Using the ethnically and religiously diverse middle class of the cosmopolitan city of Aleppo, Syria, as a point of departure, Watenpaugh explores the larger political and social implications of what being modern meant in the non-West in the first half of the twentieth century.
Well researched and provocative, Being Modern in the Middle East makes a critical contribution not just to Middle East history, but also to the global study of class, mass violence, ideas, and revolution.
Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
In a remarkable piece of scholarship, Watenpaugh situates the concept of "modernity" at the core of the middle class experience in Aleppo from the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 through the end of the mandate period in 1946. "Modernity" - a term which is often over-used and inadequately historicized by many scholars - here avoids anachronism, and indeed, one of the major historiographical contributions of Watenpaugh's text is the grounded and intricate examination of precisely what it was to "be modern" in a period marked by numerous challenges to the formation of various modes of identity. As Watenpaugh's nuanced and sophisticated analysis reveals, "being modern" was not simply a discursive act of saying so - rather, in this case, modernity was a conscious and contentious process of invention by a disparate middle class attempting to situtate itself in the midst of an array of social and politcal changes. It is refreshing to read scholarship that does not shy away from the making of the middle class; and Watenpaugh's careful treatment of such an analytical category provides a useful investagative framework for scholars whose work falls outside the Middle East. Finally, by situating an "experience of modernity" as an internal facet of middle class identity in Aleppo - rather than as an externally imposed product of the "West" or an unconscious mimicry of Western practices - it once again becomes clear that circuits of transnational dialogue need critical engagment before we can posit the a priori existence of all of the "isms" found in Watenpaugh's title.
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Being Modern in the Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism, and the Arab Middle...
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