Week 2: Where and what? Locating the Middle East

Mini Lecture

Core Seminar Readings:

Nile Green, ‘Rethinking the “Middle East” after the Oceanic Turn,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 34:3 (2014), pp. 556–64.

Karen Culcasi, ‘Constructing and Naturalizing the Middle East,’ Geographical Review, 100:4 (2010), pp. 583–97.

Guillemette Crouzet, ‘Introduction,’ in Inventing the Middle East: Britain and the Persian Gulf in the Age of Global Imperialism (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022).

Further Readings:

Abbas Amanat, ‘Introduction: Is There a Middle East? Problematizing a Virtual Space,’ in Michael E. Bonine, Abbas Amanat, and Michael Ezekiel Gasper (eds.), Is There a Middle East? The Evolution of a Geopolitical Concept (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), pp.1-10.

Roderic H. Davison, ‘Where is the Middle East?,’ Foreign Affairs 38, no.4 (1960): 665–75.

Clayton R. Koppes, ‘Captain Mahan, General Gordon, and the Origins of the Term “Middle East,"' Middle Eastern Studies 12, no.1 (1976): 95–8.

Karen Culcasi, ‘Cartographic Constructions of the Middle East,’ Imago Mundi 60, no. 1 (2008): 120–1

Thomas Scheffler, ‘“Fertile Crescent,” “Orient,” “Middle East”: The Changing Mental Maps of Southwest Asia,’ European Review of History / Revue européenne d’histoire 10, no.2 (2003): 253–72.

Daniel Foliard, ‘Introduction,’ in Dislocating the Orient: British Maps and the Making of the Middle East, 1854–1921 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017).

Karen Culcasi, ‘Mapping the Middle East from Within: (Counter-)Cartographies of an Imperialist Construction,’ Antipode 44, no.4 (2012): 1099–1118

Rashid Khalidi, ‘The “Middle East” as a Framework of Analysis: Re-mapping a Region in the Era of Globalization,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 18, no.1 (1998): 74-81.

David Fromkin, ‘How the Modern Middle East Map Came to Be Drawn,’ Smithsonian Magazine 22, no. 2 (1991): 132–47

Nikki R. Keddie, ‘Is There a Middle East?,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 4, no.3 (1973): 255–71.

David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: Creating the Modern Middle East, 1914–1922, (London: Deutsch, 1989)

Nile Green, ‘The View from the Edge: The Indian Ocean’s Middle East,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 4 (2016): 746–9.

Fahad Bishara, ‘Ships Passing in the Night? Reflections on the Middle East in the Indian Ocean,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies 48, no. 4, (2016): 758-762.