(Re-)Framing the Persian Gulf and Arabia

This course offers you the opportunity to study the politics and societies of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf in the 19th and 20th centuries through a critical historical lens.  It is designed to question scholarly and popular claims about the Gulf and Arabia by examining both classic works of scholarship and literary/cinematic representation, as well as recent attempts to rethink the geographic, sectarian, national, and ethnic boundaries of the region. The latter include: the nature and legacy of imperialism in the Gulf, the significance of social and labor movements in shaping the kinds of modern states that emerged in the region, the relationship between tribe and state, the formation of nation-states and national identity, and the constitutive role of mobility and migration in the region. In this course, you will engage critically with a range of texts - literary, visual, theoretical - that establish knowledge about the Gulf to assess the merits and limits of the frameworks used to traditionally study it. The aim of the course is to provide you with the theoretical skills and empirical evidence necessary to develop your own arguments about the Gulf's past and present, as well as alternative criteria to understand the present predicaments of its peoples. No prior knowledge of the Gulf or Arabia is required.