Game-Changer: The Rise and Expansion of the Global University

Arab Revolution, Arab Spring, Baraza, Columbia University, Conflict, Iran, Jihad, Libya, Maghreb, Mediterranean, MENA, Middle East, Politics, Revolution, Syria, Tunisia, United States
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A mural representing the relationship between NYU and NYUAD. http://new.pentagram.com/2011/04/paula-scher-nyu-abu-dhabi-mura/

There is a de facto 21st century gold rush among elite universities in the United States. In the age of globalized capital, privatization of the state, and commodified education, top-ranked, private universities and colleges are expanding beyond U.S. borders and building proxy campuses in locations fundamental to American economic and military interests. Of the U.S. universities engaged in this project, the pioneer has been New York University (NYU), the first university ever to clone its flagship campus into a standalone campus abroad. In doing so, NYU president John Sexton — infamous for declaring that he’d turn NYU into a leader in the “ICE sector (1)” — upped the ante in the race for such capital by building a new campus in the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.). New York University Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) built itself its own private island in the Persian Gulf with a name fit for the neoliberal ideal it was trying to embody: the Island of Happiness (Saadiyat Island). Beyond happiness, a third of the world’s oil reserves lie beneath and around this little island — and Iran is right across the gulf.

There is hardly a project in the Persian Gulf that is not met with controversy. This one is no exception. The construction of NYUAD is murky business for many reasons, particularly NYU’s contracting of Nardello & Co. — an investigating firm that prides itself on getting high-profile corporations out of wrongdoing allegations —  to perform a fact finding mission regardings its labor practices in the construction of the Saadiyat Island campus. In addition to the major ethical questions posed by the abuse of labor used to construct NYUAD’s campus, the project represents a marriage of the university with oil capital and U.S. military and economic strategic interests to create the “global university.”

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Imperial Flush: Crane Co. Valves in Yemen and Saudi Arabia

Agriculture, Baraza, English, History, MESAAS, Middle East, Politics, United States
Valve World Image
Image from Crane Co.’s trade magazine, The Valve World (September-October 1932, 166).

In America today, showering daily is a social norm. We avoid body odor, grease, and sweat, and consider such qualities unhygienic or “gross.” We also consider the technologies behind the daily shower – bathrooms, sewers, and heating systems – and the parts that construct them – valves and pipes – to be commonplace. Their omnipresence makes them unlikely to warrant a second thought. Despite this, our methods of cleaning ourselves have social, commercial, and even political implications.

Mass-produced valves, showers, and water heaters have only appeared in the past century. Crane Company, an American manufacturer of pipes, fittings, and valves, boasts on its website that in the 1920s it “conceive[d] the idea of the modern bathroom,” designating the American bathroom as “a sign of affluence and social pride.” The bathrooms we use today are really only a century old, as are the norms associated with them.

Over the 1920s, Crane Co. advertisers created concepts like “body odor” to form a consumer base for their new product: bathroom fixtures. Through magazine advertisements and bathroom showrooms, bathrooms became increasingly prevalent, and daily showers more common. Skyscrapers, factories, and hospitals all began to include water supply and sewer systems.

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Between Miracle and Afterthought: Hebrew in MESAAS

Baraza, Isreal, Language, MESAAS, Middle East, Palestine

My parents, native Israelis with wide and deep ties to the Hebrew language, insisted, always, on maintaining a Hebrew-speaking household in the U.S. so that my two sisters and I might carry on in the world with “a miracle” of a language at our disposal. I remember my father telling me excitedly that, “before 1948, no one made love in Hebrew!” I was fascinated by the thought of a language existing by virtue of some dedicated people carefully applying ancient, known words to their contemporary surroundings. I would imagine them staring at birds or one another in an attempt to string together some sounds and silences that might do justice to a subject’s fullest character.

But studying Hebrew literature in MESAAS has been one long attempt to bend my thinking to accommodate the reality that modern Hebrew literature is a contemporary Middle Eastern affair. Or is it? Hebrew literature and Israeli culture fits into MESAAS geographically; but Hebrew has long been a shared cultural language of the Jews that only in the 20th century became a spoken vernacular in Israel. A question of belonging arises: how does modern Hebrew literature fit into MESAAS when we look beyond basic points of contact, such as the Semitic origins of the Hebrew language or the many centuries of political-Zionist poetry?

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Sketch of a Literary Scene

Africa, Arabic, Arabic Literature, Baraza, Middle East, Reading

The stories in our collection span the roughly four decades since the publication of Tayyib Salih’s much acclaimed Season of Migration to the North in 1969. Some are works of social protest, others of technical mastery or experimental daring. Despite variations in theme and style, we’ve chosen them because they all revolve around Khartoum in one way or another. For that reason, contemporary literary culture in Khartoum is one of the most valuable frames for understanding the literature produced in and about the city. The questions are deceptively simple. Who writes? Who reads? Where do people in Khartoum go to buy books, hear poetry, discuss literature and workshop their own writing? By offering a brief sketch of the literary scene, based on my own short stay in Khartoum last year, I want to start to explore the city as a metaphor for the bundle of expectations, literary conventions, and social mores that shape what Sudanese writers write and why.

I myself have only become acquainted with many of the stories in my growing collection over the past year, culled initially from the dozens of books I carried back from Khartoum to Cairo in a cardboard box. The less controversial ones I bought in the dusty book shops clustered around the University of Khartoum, but the majority were recommended to me by friends and acquired at a monthly open-air book market called Mafroosh, written up not so long ago in the New York Times.

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Modeling the Collective Hero: An Interview with Egyptian Playwright Ibrahim El-Husseiny

Baraza, Egypt, MENA, Middle East, Revolution, , , ,

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Ibrahim El-Husseiny wrote the play “Comedy of Sorrows” only a few months after Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in February of 2011.  As such, it was one of the very first creative pieces produced in response to the Egyptian revolution.  Following a run of 60 performances in Egypt, a translation by Rebekah Maggor toured the States in Spring of 2012 as a staged reading, with performances at CUNY Graduate Center, the Radcliffe Institute, and Vanderbilt University, amongst other venues.  Two years into the revolution, Hani Omar Khalil sat down with El-Husseiny in Cairo to discuss both his own evolution as a political playwright as well as the role of theatrical narrative in the shaping of national discourse.  Questions and answers were given in Arabic, with translational assistance provided by Omar S. Khalil.

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Five Questions with Dr. Khaled Fahmy

Baraza, Five Questions, Middle East

Five Questions with Dr. Khaled Fahmy-Question 1 from Baraza Video on Vimeo.

2011 has marked a new model of revolution that stem from practical realities and shun standardized theory. What do you think the prospects are for such demands for change that function in the absence of macro-social frameworks and ideologies? What ideas or discourses are likely to rise to the fore in the future? Does the nation state have a future as the main unit of political organization? If not, how will people and societies be organized?

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Good Violence, Bad Violence

Africa, Baraza, India, Mahmood Mamdani, Middle East, Pakistan, Reviews, South Asia, , , , , , , ,

GVBV02242013Written in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Mahmood Mamdani’s 2005 book Good Muslim, BadMuslim historicizes the violence of terrorism. It extricates terrorism from the narrow morality that arises from the convergence of ethics and national interest, and instead locates terrorism “first and foremost as unfinished business of the Cold War.”1 “Good” and “bad” Muslims, terms borrowed from former U.S. President George W. Bush,2 are descriptions not of religious adherence, but of utility to U.S. foreign policy. As yesterday’s allies become today’s antagonists, the labels change to morally denigrate American foes.

Reintroducing history to the violence, the book begins by tracing the broad contours of the relationship between nation-state modernity and violence. Mamdani rejects violence as a pre-modern phenomenon, asserting instead that there is an inextricable relationship between violence and modernity.3 This is the book’s central theoretical framework: violence is political, not cultural.

The first chapter builds on this history of violence, and offers an alternative account of political Islam. It exposes the caricatures of Muslims and Islam that are deployed to provide a moral veneer for expansionist imperialism. The subsequent three chapters offer a chronological account of the violence of U.S. imperialist policies, beginning with post-Vietnam American support for anti-nationalist militancies, and through the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Today’s terrorism, the book asserts, is a direct consequence of these policies. The final chapter of the book offers closing thoughts, exhorting a review of American policies that “consistently seem to erode support and generate opposition.”4

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“Sumeida’s Song: Giving Operatic Voice to Revolution in Egypt”

Africa, Arabic Literature, Baraza, Middle East, Reviews, South Asia, , ,

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“Egypt is heading towards civil war”, composer Mohammed Fairouz plainly states in discussion of his opera, Sumeida’s Song, which premiered at the Prototype Festival in SoHo. Civil war is perhaps too strong a word to describe the current state of affairs in Egypt, but few would argue with Fairouz that the country is going, in his words, in “a particularly bad direction.”

After a series of electoral victories, Egypt’s ruling Muslim Brotherhood effectively spent the final months of 2012 fast-tracking drastic changes to the constitution that many seculars, liberals, and democratic activists believe provide inadequate protection for women, religious minorities, and other groups, while laying the groundwork for implementation of Sharia law in the country (“Sharia law in Egypt?” Fairouz asks plaintively, before giving in to nervous laughter. “I mean, it’s not Saudi Arabia, it’s Egypt!”).

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