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Book Review: Salaita, The Uncultured Wars
Feb. 13th, 2010 09:29 pmThe Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays
by Steven Salaita
I read this slim volume of essays about a year ago, for the simple reason that it was on the shelf in the Arab-American studies section of NYU's Bobst Library (E184, right at the end of that aisle on the fifth floor...what, like you don't have certain sections of the library memorized?), and I hadn't read it yet. I'd enjoyed a previous book of Salaita's, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, and was interested to see where he was going. My first impressions of the book were overwhelmingly positive; I believe I actually read the entirety of "Open-Mindedness on Independence Day," a scathing critique of a Thomas Friedman column, to the first person I saw after I read it. I wrote a review of it at the Livejournal community 50books_poc (for people aiming to read more books by people of color) to encourage others to pick it up. In particular, I loved the book's prioritization of questions of discourse and meaning, his exhortation in the final essay to please listen to Arabs when they speak, rather than rendering them impossible to speak with. This is exactly the line of argument I'm developing in my dissertation, under the rubric of "discursive misrecognition." (You can read more about the way I'm formulating this concept vis-a-vis critical theories of recognition in this paper.) When I began designing the syllabus for the course I am teaching this semester, called The Middle East in Diaspora, I ordered it for the students without a second thought.
Then I reread it.
( I still like the book. In fact, I might like it more... )
by Steven Salaita
I read this slim volume of essays about a year ago, for the simple reason that it was on the shelf in the Arab-American studies section of NYU's Bobst Library (E184, right at the end of that aisle on the fifth floor...what, like you don't have certain sections of the library memorized?), and I hadn't read it yet. I'd enjoyed a previous book of Salaita's, Anti-Arab Racism in the USA, and was interested to see where he was going. My first impressions of the book were overwhelmingly positive; I believe I actually read the entirety of "Open-Mindedness on Independence Day," a scathing critique of a Thomas Friedman column, to the first person I saw after I read it. I wrote a review of it at the Livejournal community 50books_poc (for people aiming to read more books by people of color) to encourage others to pick it up. In particular, I loved the book's prioritization of questions of discourse and meaning, his exhortation in the final essay to please listen to Arabs when they speak, rather than rendering them impossible to speak with. This is exactly the line of argument I'm developing in my dissertation, under the rubric of "discursive misrecognition." (You can read more about the way I'm formulating this concept vis-a-vis critical theories of recognition in this paper.) When I began designing the syllabus for the course I am teaching this semester, called The Middle East in Diaspora, I ordered it for the students without a second thought.
Then I reread it.
( I still like the book. In fact, I might like it more... )