Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
An extraordinary account of survival in Syria's most notorious military prisons that is written.
Jamal Saeed arrived as a refugee in Canada in 2016. In his native Syria, as a young man, his writing pushed both social and political norms. For this reason, as well as his opposition to the regimes of the al-Assads, he was imprisoned on three occasions for a total of 12 years. In each instance, he was held without formal charge and without judicial process.
“My...
Author
Language
English
Description
"The mess hall was 60×30 meters; it had a stage, from which 12 ropes hung and underneath each rope there was a chair. The groups of prisoners they brought in would rush to jump on the chair; they had very high moral. They would shout, "Hail to the MEK!, before they were executed...
What if there was a story that had never been told, a story that spanned almost five decades, a story that involved the great conflict between the superpowers,...
Author
Language
English
Description
On March 5th, 2007, a car bomb was exploded on al-Mutanabbi Street in Baghdad. More than thirty people were killed and more than one hundred were wounded. This locale is the historic center of Baghdad bookselling, a winding street filled with bookstores and outdoor bookstalls. Named after the famed 10th century classical Arab poet al-Mutanabbi, it has been the heart and soul of the Baghdad literary and intellectual community. This anthology begins...
Author
Language
English
Description
Music in Arabia extends and challenges existing narratives of the region's distinctive but understudied music to reveal diverse and dynamic music cultures rooted in centuries-old heritage.
Contributors to Music in Arabia bring a critical eye and ear to the contemporary soundscape, musical life, and expressive culture in the Gulf region. Including work by leading scholars and local authorities, this collection presents fresh perspectives and new research...
Author
Language
English
Description
The simple act of inscription, both minute and epic, can be a powerful tool to bear witness and give voice to those, who are oppressed, silenced, and forgotten. In the eras of Hafiz al-Asad and his son Bashar, Syrian political dissidents have written, extensively about their experiences of detention, both while in prison and afterwards. This body of writing, largely untranslated into English, is essential to understanding the oppositional political...
Author
Language
English
Description
The first history of slavery in this key Middle Eastern country and how it shaped the nation's unique character.
Slavery in the Middle East is a growing field of study, but the history of slavery in a key country, Iran, has never before been written. This history extends to Africa in the west and India in the east, to Russia and Turkmenistan in the north, and to the Arab states in the south. As the slave trade between Iran and these regions shifted...
Author
Language
English
Description
Moving Memory is an ethnography of remembrance in the field of tension between post-dictatorship Chile and occupied Palestine that offers new insights into memory politics as a globally resurgent and increasingly transnational phenomenon. It tells a largely untold story of a Palestinian diaspora: how a predominantly Christian, conservative, and wealthy elite has come to form the backbone of a diasporic community to which the Palestinian struggle remains...
Author
Language
English
Description
A Global Idea outlines how youth-as shown by the Arab Spring uprisings and subsequent state responses-became a prominent social and political category during the first two decades of the twenty-first century in the Middle East. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, interview data, and textual analysis, Mayssoun Sukarieh explains that the spread of youth as an important category is linked to the operation of a "global youth development complex," a diverse...
Author
Language
English
Description
Treating the everyday as central to the study of regional and international politics, this book reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. It provides a unique and vivid look into the political dynamics that characterized the everyday lives of Libyans, offering a compelling counterargument to those who insist on framing the history of the country as a stateless, authoritarian,...
Author
Language
English
Description
Rooted in the world historical methodology of John O. Voll, this collection brings together a diverse group of scholars to investigate the ongoing impact of revival and reform movements beginning in the eighteenth century and continuing through to the present. Ranging from the MENA region to Africa, India, and China, and covering a variety of religious interpretations, from scripturalist to Sufism, these essays offer new perspectives on movements...
Author
Language
English
Description
Traditionally, humanitarianism is considered a nonpolitical urgent response to human suffering. However, this characterization ignores the politics that create and are created by the crises and the increasingly long-term dimension of relief.
In “The Politics of Crisis-Making”, by shedding light on how humanitarian practice becomes enmeshed with diverse forms of welfare and development, Estella Carpi exposes how the politics of defining crises...
Author
Language
English
Description
Palestinians living on different sides of the Green Line make up approximately one-fifth of Israeli citizens and about four-fifths of the population of the West Bank. In both groups, activists assert that they share a single political struggle for national liberation. Yet, obstacles inhibit their ability to speak to each other and as a collective. Geopolitical boundaries fragment Palestinians into ever smaller groups. Crossing a Line enters these...
Author
Language
English
Description
In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of both bystanders and police. Screen Shots studies this phenomenon from the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, Israeli soldiers, Jewish...
Author
Language
English
Description
“War Remains” traces the poetics of ruination and resistance in select contemporary Lebanese wartime literature, cultural production, and sites of memory. Drawing upon work from southern Lebanon and Beirut, Khayyat examines how war remains are employed as a resistant trope in the intellectual spaces of war's aftermath. She focuses on "Southern Counterpublics," a collective of poets, novelists, activists, artists, and ordinary citizens and their...
Author
Language
English
Description
Practicing Sectarianism explores the imaginative and contradictory ways that people live sectarianism. The book's essays use the concept as an animating principle within a variety of sites across Lebanon and its diasporas and over a range of historical periods. With contributions from historians and anthropologists, this volume reveals the many ways sectarianism is used to exhibit, imagine, or contest power: What forms of affective pull does it have...
Author
Language
English
Description
Within the heart of the Jewish city of Tel Aviv, there is a hidden reality-Palestinians who work, study, and live as an unseen minority without access to equal urban citizenship.
Grounded in the everyday lives of Palestinians in Tel Aviv, The Invisible Palestinians offers an ethnographic critique of the city's self-proclaimed openness and liberalism. Andreas Hackl reveals that Palestinians' access to the social and economic opportunities afforded...
Author
Language
English
Description
This book offers a provocative retelling of Palestinian political history through an examination of the international commissions that have investigated political violence and human rights violations. More than twenty commissions have been convened over the last century, yet no significant change has resulted from these inquiries. The findings of the very first, the 1919 King-Crane Commission, were suppressed. The Mitchell Committee, convened in the...
Author
Language
English
Description
With the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Iraqis abroad, hoping to return one day to a better Iraq, became uncertain exiles. Return to Ruin tells the human story of this exile in the context of decades of U.S. imperial interests in Iraq-from the U.S. backing of the 1963 Ba'th coup and support of Saddam Hussein's regime in the 1980s, to the 1991 Gulf War and 2003 invasion and occupation.
Zainab Saleh shares the experiences of Iraqis she met over fourteen years...
Author
Language
English
Description
Confronting the past has become a byword for democratization. How societies and governments commemorate their violent pasts is often appraised as a litmus test of their democratization claims. Regardless of how critical such appraisals may be, they tend to share a fundamental assumption: commemoration, as a symbol of democratization, is ontologically distinct from violence. The pitfalls of this assumption have been nowhere more evident than in Turkey...
Author
Language
English
Description
In today's interconnected global village, Iran remains a mystery to much of the rest of the world-especially to those living in the United States and the west. While the country is often synonymous with rogue behavior on the world stage, there is also another, rarely seen side to this nation of 80 million, including being home to the greatest number of Jews in the Middle East outside of Israel, and having the largest transsexual population in the...
In Interlibrary Loan
Didn't find what you need? Items not owned by Penticton Public Library can be requested from other Interlibrary Loan libraries to be delivered to your local library for pickup. Items must be over 1 year old.
Didn't find it?
Can't find what you are looking for? Try our Materials Request Service for new books published this year. Submit Request