Violence and the City in the Modern Middle East

This book explores violence in the public lives of modern Middle Eastern cities, approaching violence as an individual and collective experience, a historical event, and an urban process. Violence and the city coexist in a complicated dialogue, and critical consideration of the city offers an important way to understand the transformative powers of violence-its ability to redraw the boundaries of urban life, to create and divide communities, and to affect the ruling strategies of local elites, governments, and transnational political players.

The essays included in this volume reflect the diversity of Middle Eastern urbanism from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries, from the capitals of Cairo, Tunis, and Baghdad to the provincial towns of Jeddah, Nablus, and Basra and the oil settlements of Dhahran and Abadan. In reconstructing the violent pasts of cities, new vistas on modern Middle Eastern history are opened, offering alternative and complementary perspectives to the making and unmaking of empires, nations, and states. Given the crucial importance of urban centers in shaping the Middle East in the modern era, and the ongoing potential of public histories to foster dialogue and reconciliation, this volume is both critical and timely.

Auteur

Edited by Nelida Fuccaro

Contenu

1. Urban Life and Questions of Violence
   -Nelida Fuccaro
2. The Semantics of Violence and Space
   -Rasmus Christian Elling
3. Elite Conflict and the Urban Environment: Eighteenth-Century Cairo
   -James E. Baldwin
4. Urban Space and Prestige: When Festivals Turned Violent in Jeddah, 1880s-1960s
   -Ulrike Freitag
5. Citizenship Rights and Semantics of Colonial Power and Resistance: Haifa, Jaffa, and Nablus, 1931-193
   -Lauren Banko
6. Challenging the Ottoman Pax Urbana: Intercommunal Clashes in 1857 Tunis
   -Nora Lafi
7. A Tamed Urban Revolution: Saudi Arabia's Oil Conurbation and the 1967 Riots
   -Claudia Ghawri
8. Making and Unmaking Spaces of Security:Basra as Battlefront, Basra Insurgent(1980-1991)
   -Dina Rizk Khoury
9. A Patriotic Uprising: Baghdadi Jews and the Wathba
   -Orit Bashkin
10. Dissecting Moments of Unrest: Twenty-Century Kirkuk
    -Nelida Fuccaro
11. War of Clubs: Struggle for Space in Abadan and the 1946 Oil Strike
    -Rasmus Christian Elling
12. Urban Rupture: A Fire, Two Hotels, and the Transformation of Cairo
    -Yasser Elsheshtawy