Spring 2011 MESAAS Courses

Lecture and recitation. No previous study of Islam is required. The contemporary Islamic world studied through freshly translated texts; recorded interviews with religious, political, and intellectual leaders; and films highlighting the main artistic and cultural currents. Topics include religion and society, religion and politics, issues of development, theories of government, gender issues, East-West confrontation, theatre, arts, films, poetry, music, and the short novel.

Prerequisites: Instructor Permission This seminar, designed for seniors, aims to acquaint students with the notion and theoretical understanding of culture and to introduce them to a critical method by which they can study and appreciate contemporary culture in the Arab World. The seminar will survey examples of written and cinematic culture (fiction and autobiography), as well as music, dance, and literary criticism in the contemporary Arab world. Students will be reading novels, autobiographies and literary criticism, as well as watch films and listen to music as part of the syllabus. All material will be in translation. Films will be subtitled. Songs will be in Arabic.

Prerequisites: No prior knowledge of Arabic language is required. This course questions the popular assumption that the tales of the Thousand and One Nights lack any Islamic content and that their fantastic or erotic dimensions are the only dynamic narrative components behind the vogue.

An exploration of subjecthood, subjection and subjectivity in Western-Armenian literature, taking Ottoman-Armenian writer Hagop Oshagan's (1883-1948) prison-themed novels as its point of departure. Readings will also include Dostoyevsky, Hugo, Bakhtin, Lukacs and Foucault alongside the works of other Armenian writers. Special attention will be paid to the impact of the Armenian nationalist movement and representations of "the Turk."

This course will combine study of long-term historical sociology with more short term understanding of policies and their possible effects. Though its main purpose will be to provide students with an understanding of politics after independence, it will argue, methodologically, that this understanding should be based on a study of historical sociology plotting long-term shifts in the structure of social power.

This course is designed for undergraduate students as a survey course of modern Pakistani history from 1947 to the present. With a topsy-turvy history of military rule and civilian governments, we will follow the chronological evolution of Pakistan's political path since in gained independence. The course will examine the six 'eras' that help define Pakistan's history, and will highlight political, economic and institutional developments.

Since it re-emerged some three or four decades ago, Islamic law has created and defined much of political discourse, certainly in the Islamic world but also in the West. This phenomenon raises many questions, especially in the light of the fact that "modernized" Islamic law, in strictly legal terms, has been playing a fairly marginal role. This course looks at the nineteenth-century systematic collapse of the Shari'a under colonialist pressure, trying to unpack the epistemic and cultural shifts that took place due to a process by which the legal systems of the Muslim world were thoroughly westernized.

As a result of a continuous state of war, Israeli culture arguably presents the most sustained cultural elaboration of war in the West. The course will map and examine the figures, textual and visual, that form the Israeli cultural discourse of war. History and the theory of war form an integral part of the discussion, and serve to elucidate the discursive nature, meaning and place of war in Israeli culture and history in its global context.

RELI DYNAMIC/LITERARY PROD