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Stephen Sheehi

College of William and Mary, Asian and Middle East Studies Program, Sultan Qaboos Professor of Middle East Studies

College of William and Mary, Modern Languages and Literatures, Faculty Member

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(he/him) Scholar of 19th-20th century Middle East, interested in cultural and literary history, visual culture, liberation struggles, racism, anti-semitism and Islamophobia, and decolonial theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis especially within the context of the Global South and marginalized communities.
Address: Decolonizing Humanities Project
Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Program
Asian and Pacific Islander American Studies Program
Modern Languages and Literatures Dept.
William & Mary
Williamsburg, VA (Turtle Island)

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Doha Institute for Graduate Studies

Nancy C Hollander

Muhammad Saadah

University of California, Los Angeles

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

Nadera Shalhoub

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

UCL Institute of Education

Madalena Santos

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Papers by Stephen Sheehi

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation

If you're looking for another book on victims of apartheid-induced trauma or a psychoanalysis of ... more If you're looking for another book on victims of apartheid-induced trauma or a psychoanalysis of occupation, this is not it. Instead, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi have written a brilliant, insurgent work of decolonial theory and practice that centers the labor of Palestinian clinicians and their patients seeking to restore and sustain a sense of self, community, cultural integrity, and `presence' under the violence of settler colonialism. Building on and moving beyond Frantz Fanon, the authors understand the project of psychoanalysis in Palestine is not adjustment but resistance, liberation, and ultimately decolonization."-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Psychoanalysis Under Occupation makes a compelling argument that interrupts settler colonial epistemic violence. Theorized and discussed in a robust, sophisticated, and well-argued manner, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation prioritizes Palestinian clinician's expressions, conceptualizing an Arab Palestinian theory of psychoanalyses and resistance. Lara and Stephen Sheehi's thoughtful and sensitive examination of al-nafs is a major contribution to psychoanalytic decolonial feminist knowledge produced as/through a liberatory struggle."

Vaporizando la inocencia blanca

Metales Pesados eBooks, Dec 1, 2022

Glass Plates and Kodak Cameras: Arab Amateur Photography in the “Era of Film”

The Indigenous Lens: Glass Plates and the Kodak

This paper is resistant to aging (dIn/Iso 9706) Printed in germany www.degruyter.com Printed with... more This paper is resistant to aging (dIn/Iso 9706) Printed in germany www.degruyter.com Printed with generous financial support from the dr. Carlo fleischmann foundation (see www.dcff.org) in Zurich, the dr. h. c. Kaspar M. fleischmann Project to support research on Photography at the Chair for the history of the fine arts, Institute of art history of the university of Zurich, and from the faculty of historical and Cultural studies, university of Vienna. 145 sTaCI g. sCheIWILLer relocating sevruguin: Contextualizing the Political Climate of the Iranian Photographer antoin sevruguin (c.

Epilogue: The Presence and Potential of Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

Visual Interlude: Photographic Images from Ottoman and Mandate Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

The selection of photographs in this section come from the albums of Wasif Jawhariyyeh that are i... more The selection of photographs in this section come from the albums of Wasif Jawhariyyeh that are in discussion in this book. While we are mindful that they are only a small fraction of the images, we present them in order to illustrate a number of different dimensions of the visual narrative that Jawhariyyeh unfolds for his viewership. Few images in his albums are self-generated, and none of the photographs in this Visual Interlude were taken by him personally, although he appears in one (see fig. 3.17). These images represent the photographs that he collected through different means, over different periods in his life, and ones he valued enough to carefully place within the narrative of his albums. Many of these images are easily found, especially those produced by the American Colony's Department of Photography, which can all be located in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Yet, for us, the value of the images lies not in their "originality" but in the ways they are located in relation to one another and in relation to the historical experiences that Jawhariyyeh was registering. Moreover, the value and coherence of the images emerge from meaning produced precisely through their deployment within a visual compendium of an "illustrated history of Palestine. " We also need to recognize that the Visual Interlude makes stark the gender imbalance in Jawhariyyeh's albums and, therefore, in his visual narrative. It is true that women have a considerably more prominent place, even if they are still underrepresented, in his written narrative. Images of women are found throughout the seven albums. The largest cluster of named, known women is the intervention by Arab Women's Executive Committee (see chapter 5 and fig. 3.1). Women are often named as members of families, described in relation to their male counterparts (as wives, sisters, aunts, etc.), and in relation to their social networks, geographies, and communities. Palestinian women appear often in family, school, and institutional

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine, 2022

Camera Palæstina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–197... more Camera Palæstina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums titled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational period, the authors explore not just major historical events and the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience from the living past to the living present of Arab Palestine.

Beyond OrientalismToward a History of Indigenista Photography in the Arab World

THE HANDBOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIES, 2020

The Life and Times of Louis Saboungi A Nomadological Study of Ottoman Arab Photography

'Photography', Geoffrey Batchen tells us, 'was a product of (and contributor to) certain shifts a... more 'Photography', Geoffrey Batchen tells us, 'was a product of (and contributor to) certain shifts and changes within the fabric of European culture as a whole.'[1] The comment seems almost a truism except for when the field of art history and photography studies places the onus on the scholars of the Middle East to somehow prove or disprove such an axiomatic claim. The challenge comes with a loaded question: how does looking at photography from the 'East' allow the photograph to be read differently? That is, if photography was a product of certain shifts in the fabric of European culture must photography not 'look' and be looked at differently in the context of the Middle East? The question, despite its intention, suggests an expectation that one must accept the 'difference' of 'non-Western' photography. It is imbricated within a complex ideological and epistemological juggernaut that searches for presumed exclusive codes structuring 'non-Western' photographic surfaces, which exist beyond the perspective of 'Western theory' and photographic history. If a photograph is to express a story of its local context, must that local context be different by merit of it being not of the western world? Scholars such as Ali Behdad, Issam Nassar, Mary Roberts and others have started unfolding the assumed mutual exclusivity of 'Western' and 'Eastern' photography.[2] They have matched the question of how do those from the 'East' look at photographs with incisive inquiries such as that posed by Greg Grandin: 'can the subaltern be seen' or, perhaps, more appropriate to this article, what can the subaltern see?[3] Before delving further into the complexities of 'reading' Middle Eastern photography it is, therefore, essential to understand how indigenous photography of the nineteenth century Arab world cannot be separated from the era known as al-nahda al-'arabiyya (the Arab Renaissance), which unfolded within the larger Ottoman reform movement known as Tanzimat and Osmanlılık modernity. [4] The Tanzimat, or Risorgimento, was the nineteenth century reform movement within the Ottoman Empire, starting with Sultan Mahmud II and ending with Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid (Abdülhamid), of whom we will hear more. The Tanzimat, or 'Re-beginning' is traditionally marked by the destruction of the Janissaries (known as the 'Auspicious Event') and the Gülhane Firman, which ushered in a series of legislative and legal reforms, including new land, civil and criminal codes. Osmanlılık or Ottomanism was the term used to identify the values and principles of this movement. In the case of the Arab world, al-nahda al-'arabiyya, or what is commonly translated as the 'Arab Renaissance', was the civilization project embedded within Osmanlılık modernity. Within the context of the Tanzimat, Arab intellectuals in Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo were formulating the role and reform of Arab society and identity in this 'new era', or al-'asr al-jadid.[5] If any idiom represented the ethos of Ottoman modernity and al-nahda, it was 'civilization and progress' (altamaddun wal-taqaddum). This phrase and these goals structured virtually every cultural production of the era, mobilizing cultural acts in the cause of 'reform' (islah), unity, and social http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123 May 2015 betterment. While what I term as nahda ideology shared with Osmanlılık ideology a common nomenclature of and formula for reform, it spoke specifically of Arab identity, Arab culture, Arab history, and Arab societies. While nahda writing was marked by a variety of competing, often opposing political positions, they all shared a concern with the local, thinking out Syrian or Egyptian identity in contrast to Turkish Ottoman identity. 'Arab photography', like all cultural productions, must be understood within the context of al-nahda, itself contingent on Osmanlılık modernity. It must be understood as a product of its own history. This intelligibility-the process of recognition at the heart of the production, circulation, and display of the photograph-does not mean that the semiotic and ideological system of the photograph was singular, closed, or exclusive. Such an assumption is found, effectively, in questions that consider how 'Easterners' look at photographs. Rather, taking the intelligibility of the photograph as our starting point, we are forced to approach and acknowledge the surface of the image as its manifest content. The manifest surface of the Ottoman Arab photograph-what I have called the nahda photograph-clearly illustrates the ego-ideals of new social strata in Ottoman Syria and Egypt: namely a transformation of the peasantry, the nascent appearance of 'industrial' (or at least factory) working classes, and new effendiyya class, haute and pettybourgeoisies, petits fonctionnaires, and repurposed notable classes.[6] In this regard, the nahda photograph was a stabilizing force: a document that reproduced the ideology of economic, social, and political 'reform' (islah). It circulated among new types of individuals in order to shore up new sociabilities that otherwise displaced adjacent, pre-existing perspectives and discourses, which nahda and Osmanlılık discourses coded as 'backward'. This article does not seek to ferret out lost histories and practices, while it may do so inadvertently. This is not because I do not ascribe to the existence of such alternate histories. They surely exist in forms that need to be further investigated. However, the paradigm that photography outside of the West is often constituted by ideological and cultural difference, and alterity needs to be tempered with the re-engagement of the hegemonic forces of global capitalism that endowed photography's transparency with unprecedented truth-value. This article seeks to consider how early photography in the Middle East operated on several semiotic, social, and historical layers. The photograph's manifest surface reproduced ideologies and performed or 'enacted' subjectivities that were congruent with the hegemony of nahda discourses (discourses of progress that covered every topic from child rearing, gender roles and governance to how to develop a photograph). I borrow the term enact (and enactment) from clinical psychology to build on the speech-act theory of performativity in order to fully illustrate how photography was a social and subjective practice that manifested a particular epistemology and perspective of modernity rather than specifically producing it. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123 May 2015 If photography was a performance or enactment, then, simultaneously, the staging, performance, and language of photography also holds latent content; a history of how ideology became intelligible and how performative subjectivities carried value upon their enactment. [7] This latent level, then, is a history of displacements, violence, and the arcane. Thus, this article explores how the performative nature of photography and of the nahda photograph-the ideology that it enacted-was charged to stabilize, or at least contain, the latent violence and displaced lived-experiences that haunted photography's positivist representation. A Tale of Two Brothers If two poles, the manifest and the latent, mark the nineteenth century 'Arab' photograph, they are animated by the life and work of photographer Jurji Saboungi and his older brother, Louis, both born in Diyarbakir, or Mardin. The opposite trajectories of these two Saboungi lives mirror more than the careers each chose, rather reflecting the tension within nineteenth century nahda photography. Louis was the provocateur, opportunist, and intellectual-activist, gallivanting from adventure to adventure and opportunity to opportunity. Jurji on the other hand was staid and rooted: Beirut's most prominent photographer to Ottoman political and economic elites, Syria's 'middle stratum', the city's intellectual pantheon and most respected personalities and religious communities.[8] Some sources say that Jurji (1840-1910), also self-identified as Georges Saboungi. He opened his studio in Beirut in 1862, only two years after Trancrède Dumas-the first European to do so in the city. Fouad Debbas contends that Saboungi opened in 1878. He states that after apprenticing for years in the famed Beirut atelier Maison Bonfils, Saboungi assisted Félix Bonfils during his expeditions to Egypt and Palestine between 1867-1874. Debbas also contends that Saboungi opened in Sahat al-Qamh (Wheat Square) in Beirut after Félix returned to France because of health problems.[9] No matter the date, Jurji certainly learned photography, at least initially, from his famed brother Louis in the early 1860s. Consequently, Jurji, according to Carney Gavin, 'effectively started the Lebanese photographic industry… an industry which solely relied on local photographers.'[10] Jurji was an uncontroversial fixture of photography in the Arab Ottoman provinces. While he maintained a thriving studio in Beirut, Jurji Saboungi was mobile throughout the Ottoman Empire and, perhaps, Europe. He married a Danish woman and opened a studio at Assour Square (Sahat al-Sur, named after the old city wall), next to the train station, which is now Place de Riad al-Solh.[11] By the 1890s, his studio had moved to the Suq Sursock, in the shadow of the famous palatial maison of the Sursock family, built by Musa (Mousa) Sursock, a successful http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123

Islamophobia: The U.S. Campaign Against Muslims

Al-Kawakibi: From Political Journalism to a Political Science of the ‘Liberal’ Arab Muslim

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2017

The Love of a Woman and a Nation: Desire, Progress, and Reform in Salim al-Bustani's Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sham

Canadian review of comparative literature, 2010

Discusses the formative influences on Salim al-Bustani's novel "Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sha... more Discusses the formative influences on Salim al-Bustani's novel "Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sham" (Passion in the Damascene Gardens), often considered the first modern Arabic novel. "Salim's romance expresses how Arabic literature was a fundamental space in which to contest colonial intrusions and, in so doing, configure new possibilities for an Arab subjective ideal, that can be both progressive and authentic."

Foundations of Modern Arab Identity

Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of &... more Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of "pioneers of the Arab Renaissance," both renowned and forgotten - a pantheon of intellectuals, reformers, and journalists whose writing until now has been mostly untranslated. Against the backdrop of European imperialism in the Arab world, these literati planted the roots of modernity though their experiments in language, rhetoric, and literature. In both fiction and nonfiction they generated a radically new sense of Arab identity. At the same time, Sheehi argues, they created the terrain that produced an Arab preoccupation with "failure" and a perception of Western "superiority" - the terms intellectuals themselves used in the 19th century in diagnosing their cultural crisis. Neglected by historians, this ambivalent and contradictory state of consciousness is at the heart of the ideology of Arab identity, Sheehi says, and describes a variety of subjective po...

Duplicity and Fear

With Stones in Our Hands

Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective-aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing

Subjectivity, 2020

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect tha... more In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs "white innocence" and its attempts at "witnessing" the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of Black critical race theorists (most prominently, Hortense Spillers and Amber Jamilla Musser), we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz's "Open Casket" in conversation with Teresa Margolles's "Vaporization." In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective and aesthetic dimensions of the desire of whiteness to transcend its own matrix of race-power. We argue that Black's and Bright's interventions are refusals to accept or be the object of the desire for redemption, collaboration, and recuperative forgiveness. Margolles's Vaporization, on the other hand, compels to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh and forms by thinking through the multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions. Margolles opens possibilities for us to think about fugitive moments of material, subjectivity, and social entanglements within institutionalized alienation itself that are otherwise re-metabolized by white innocence and the global art space.

The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought

Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2018

This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting ... more This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting between a number of transnational political and cultural contexts and positions. Engaging Lama Khouri's "Through Trump's Looking Glass into Alice's Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian," this paper reveals how, on one hand, Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate; on the other hand, it also engages the ideological aspects of Palestinian Arab identity when it is transplanted to the United States, interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy. In examining the structures of these binary identity systems, I gesture toward a decolonializing psychoanalysis that adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how alienating two-ness can become a productive mode of confronting and dismantling Zionist objectification and radicalized othering.

Miki Kratsman and Ariella Azoulay. The Resolution of the Suspect. Cambridge, Mass.: Radius Books, 2016. 216 pp

Critical Inquiry, 2018

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Intro)

by Stephen Sheehi and Lara Sheehi

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, Jan 2022

Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and libe... more Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and liberatory psychoanalysis, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi platform the lives, perspectives, and insights of psychoanalytically inflected Palestinian psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, centering the stories that non-clinical Palestinians have entrusted to them over four years of community engagement with clinicians throughout historic Palestine.

Sheehi and Sheehi document the stories of Palestinian clinicians in relation to settler colonialism and violence but, even more so, in relation to their patients, communities, families, and one another (as a clinical community). In doing so, they track the appearance of settler colonialism as a psychologically extractive process, one that is often effaced by discourses of "normalization," "trauma," "resilience," and human rights, with the aid of clinicians, as well as psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine unpacks the intersection of psychoanalysis as a psychological practice in Palestine, while also advancing a set of therapeutic theories in which to critically engage and "read" the politically complex array of conditions that define life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Celia Brickman, Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind

Psychoanalysis and History, 2020

Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresol... more Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresolved tension that weaves in and out of Freud's foundational theory of the human psyche. On the one hand, Freud 'attempted to transcend the racial taxonomies of his time by creating a model of the psyche as held in common by all humans' (p. 9). On the other hand, this universal psyche emerges from an epistemology of modernity that could only posit the psyche along a developmental axis of 'progress,' proceeding from 'primitivity' to civilized. While Freud contended that the 'primitive actually lived on in the structures of contemporary European subjectivity and institutions,' Freud's term 'primitivity,' although affirming 'the universal commonality of the psyche,' was a 'racially indexed term of derogation he used to discredit the pretensions of civilization' (p. 5). Brickman carefully shows us that, no matter how meticulous Freud was to illustrate that 'the universality of the primitive psyche was found in both primitive and civilized people alike,' he inevitably 'pressed into service the available colonialist constructions concerning primitive peoples' (p. 119). In chapter 1, Brickman tracks the appearance and interrelationship between racial terms such as 'primitive,' 'savage,' 'barbarian,' 'heathen,' and 'infidel' within Western Enlightenment thought and colonial anthropology. These terms were gradated within civilizational discourses that undergirded the preeminence of European selfhood in order to justify colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and enslavement. Brickman is concerned with the rise of 'theories of the primitive mind' as 'both sites of European self-fashioning and the fashioning of the other […] in tandem with the development of the modern concept of civilization' (p. 37). She shows how these terms were associated with biological determinism in the works of a series of influential nineteenth-century European philosopherpseudoscientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Hebert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. Paying attention to the work of Bartolemé de Las Casas, she observes how the idea of the 'Noble Savage' establishes the 'primitive'who is always nonwhite-'both outside civilization but also prior to it' (p. 33). By noting the temporal-evolutionary schema of psychoanalysis, Brickman convincingly shows in chapter 2 how Freud squarely rooted psychoanalytic thought in nineteenth-century social-evolutionary thought of 'phylogenetic

Fanon in Palestine: The Settler's Town Is a Strongly Built Town

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2020

This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work... more This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work of Frantz Fanon to a group of training clinicians in the Maana Center of EMMS Nazareth Hospital in Nazareth (al‐Nasirah). Reading and discussing Fanon in Palestine with Palestinian clinicians and trainees elicited deepseated feelings of affirmation and validation, while also disclosing anxieties arising from colonial alienation, as Fanon would say. At the same time, Fanon conjures in Palestine an affirming and empowering spirit that, inevitably, results in a consideration of how Palestinian indigeneity, no matter how mediated by regimes of domination and control, recenters itself as a repost to the extractive psychological and material violence that constitutes settler colonialism; in this case, Zionism. Adopting a decolonial methodology, we came to understand how psychological theory and practice provides Palestinian clinicians a means to work for selfawareness within a regime of oppression. Centering indigenous lives, their relationships to their own collectives and communities, and their relationship the psychopathy of settler colonial structures, produced critical psychological and social knowledge.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation

If you're looking for another book on victims of apartheid-induced trauma or a psychoanalysis of ... more If you're looking for another book on victims of apartheid-induced trauma or a psychoanalysis of occupation, this is not it. Instead, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi have written a brilliant, insurgent work of decolonial theory and practice that centers the labor of Palestinian clinicians and their patients seeking to restore and sustain a sense of self, community, cultural integrity, and `presence' under the violence of settler colonialism. Building on and moving beyond Frantz Fanon, the authors understand the project of psychoanalysis in Palestine is not adjustment but resistance, liberation, and ultimately decolonization."-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination "Psychoanalysis Under Occupation makes a compelling argument that interrupts settler colonial epistemic violence. Theorized and discussed in a robust, sophisticated, and well-argued manner, Psychoanalysis Under Occupation prioritizes Palestinian clinician's expressions, conceptualizing an Arab Palestinian theory of psychoanalyses and resistance. Lara and Stephen Sheehi's thoughtful and sensitive examination of al-nafs is a major contribution to psychoanalytic decolonial feminist knowledge produced as/through a liberatory struggle."

Vaporizando la inocencia blanca

Metales Pesados eBooks, Dec 1, 2022

Glass Plates and Kodak Cameras: Arab Amateur Photography in the “Era of Film”

The Indigenous Lens: Glass Plates and the Kodak

This paper is resistant to aging (dIn/Iso 9706) Printed in germany www.degruyter.com Printed with... more This paper is resistant to aging (dIn/Iso 9706) Printed in germany www.degruyter.com Printed with generous financial support from the dr. Carlo fleischmann foundation (see www.dcff.org) in Zurich, the dr. h. c. Kaspar M. fleischmann Project to support research on Photography at the Chair for the history of the fine arts, Institute of art history of the university of Zurich, and from the faculty of historical and Cultural studies, university of Vienna. 145 sTaCI g. sCheIWILLer relocating sevruguin: Contextualizing the Political Climate of the Iranian Photographer antoin sevruguin (c.

Epilogue: The Presence and Potential of Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

Visual Interlude: Photographic Images from Ottoman and Mandate Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

The selection of photographs in this section come from the albums of Wasif Jawhariyyeh that are i... more The selection of photographs in this section come from the albums of Wasif Jawhariyyeh that are in discussion in this book. While we are mindful that they are only a small fraction of the images, we present them in order to illustrate a number of different dimensions of the visual narrative that Jawhariyyeh unfolds for his viewership. Few images in his albums are self-generated, and none of the photographs in this Visual Interlude were taken by him personally, although he appears in one (see fig. 3.17). These images represent the photographs that he collected through different means, over different periods in his life, and ones he valued enough to carefully place within the narrative of his albums. Many of these images are easily found, especially those produced by the American Colony's Department of Photography, which can all be located in the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Yet, for us, the value of the images lies not in their "originality" but in the ways they are located in relation to one another and in relation to the historical experiences that Jawhariyyeh was registering. Moreover, the value and coherence of the images emerge from meaning produced precisely through their deployment within a visual compendium of an "illustrated history of Palestine. " We also need to recognize that the Visual Interlude makes stark the gender imbalance in Jawhariyyeh's albums and, therefore, in his visual narrative. It is true that women have a considerably more prominent place, even if they are still underrepresented, in his written narrative. Images of women are found throughout the seven albums. The largest cluster of named, known women is the intervention by Arab Women's Executive Committee (see chapter 5 and fig. 3.1). Women are often named as members of families, described in relation to their male counterparts (as wives, sisters, aunts, etc.), and in relation to their social networks, geographies, and communities. Palestinian women appear often in family, school, and institutional

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine, 2022

Camera Palæstina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–197... more Camera Palæstina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums titled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this archive at the juncture between the history of photography in the Arab world and the social history of Palestine. Shedding new light on this foundational period, the authors explore not just major historical events and the development of an urban bourgeois lifestyle but a social field of vision of Palestinian life as exemplified in the Jerusalem community. Tracking the interplay between photographic images, the authors offer evidence of the unbroken field of material, historical, and collective experience from the living past to the living present of Arab Palestine.

Beyond OrientalismToward a History of Indigenista Photography in the Arab World

THE HANDBOOK OF PHOTOGRAPHY STUDIES, 2020

The Life and Times of Louis Saboungi A Nomadological Study of Ottoman Arab Photography

'Photography', Geoffrey Batchen tells us, 'was a product of (and contributor to) certain shifts a... more 'Photography', Geoffrey Batchen tells us, 'was a product of (and contributor to) certain shifts and changes within the fabric of European culture as a whole.'[1] The comment seems almost a truism except for when the field of art history and photography studies places the onus on the scholars of the Middle East to somehow prove or disprove such an axiomatic claim. The challenge comes with a loaded question: how does looking at photography from the 'East' allow the photograph to be read differently? That is, if photography was a product of certain shifts in the fabric of European culture must photography not 'look' and be looked at differently in the context of the Middle East? The question, despite its intention, suggests an expectation that one must accept the 'difference' of 'non-Western' photography. It is imbricated within a complex ideological and epistemological juggernaut that searches for presumed exclusive codes structuring 'non-Western' photographic surfaces, which exist beyond the perspective of 'Western theory' and photographic history. If a photograph is to express a story of its local context, must that local context be different by merit of it being not of the western world? Scholars such as Ali Behdad, Issam Nassar, Mary Roberts and others have started unfolding the assumed mutual exclusivity of 'Western' and 'Eastern' photography.[2] They have matched the question of how do those from the 'East' look at photographs with incisive inquiries such as that posed by Greg Grandin: 'can the subaltern be seen' or, perhaps, more appropriate to this article, what can the subaltern see?[3] Before delving further into the complexities of 'reading' Middle Eastern photography it is, therefore, essential to understand how indigenous photography of the nineteenth century Arab world cannot be separated from the era known as al-nahda al-'arabiyya (the Arab Renaissance), which unfolded within the larger Ottoman reform movement known as Tanzimat and Osmanlılık modernity. [4] The Tanzimat, or Risorgimento, was the nineteenth century reform movement within the Ottoman Empire, starting with Sultan Mahmud II and ending with Sultan 'Abd al-Hamid (Abdülhamid), of whom we will hear more. The Tanzimat, or 'Re-beginning' is traditionally marked by the destruction of the Janissaries (known as the 'Auspicious Event') and the Gülhane Firman, which ushered in a series of legislative and legal reforms, including new land, civil and criminal codes. Osmanlılık or Ottomanism was the term used to identify the values and principles of this movement. In the case of the Arab world, al-nahda al-'arabiyya, or what is commonly translated as the 'Arab Renaissance', was the civilization project embedded within Osmanlılık modernity. Within the context of the Tanzimat, Arab intellectuals in Beirut, Alexandria, and Cairo were formulating the role and reform of Arab society and identity in this 'new era', or al-'asr al-jadid.[5] If any idiom represented the ethos of Ottoman modernity and al-nahda, it was 'civilization and progress' (altamaddun wal-taqaddum). This phrase and these goals structured virtually every cultural production of the era, mobilizing cultural acts in the cause of 'reform' (islah), unity, and social http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123 May 2015 betterment. While what I term as nahda ideology shared with Osmanlılık ideology a common nomenclature of and formula for reform, it spoke specifically of Arab identity, Arab culture, Arab history, and Arab societies. While nahda writing was marked by a variety of competing, often opposing political positions, they all shared a concern with the local, thinking out Syrian or Egyptian identity in contrast to Turkish Ottoman identity. 'Arab photography', like all cultural productions, must be understood within the context of al-nahda, itself contingent on Osmanlılık modernity. It must be understood as a product of its own history. This intelligibility-the process of recognition at the heart of the production, circulation, and display of the photograph-does not mean that the semiotic and ideological system of the photograph was singular, closed, or exclusive. Such an assumption is found, effectively, in questions that consider how 'Easterners' look at photographs. Rather, taking the intelligibility of the photograph as our starting point, we are forced to approach and acknowledge the surface of the image as its manifest content. The manifest surface of the Ottoman Arab photograph-what I have called the nahda photograph-clearly illustrates the ego-ideals of new social strata in Ottoman Syria and Egypt: namely a transformation of the peasantry, the nascent appearance of 'industrial' (or at least factory) working classes, and new effendiyya class, haute and pettybourgeoisies, petits fonctionnaires, and repurposed notable classes.[6] In this regard, the nahda photograph was a stabilizing force: a document that reproduced the ideology of economic, social, and political 'reform' (islah). It circulated among new types of individuals in order to shore up new sociabilities that otherwise displaced adjacent, pre-existing perspectives and discourses, which nahda and Osmanlılık discourses coded as 'backward'. This article does not seek to ferret out lost histories and practices, while it may do so inadvertently. This is not because I do not ascribe to the existence of such alternate histories. They surely exist in forms that need to be further investigated. However, the paradigm that photography outside of the West is often constituted by ideological and cultural difference, and alterity needs to be tempered with the re-engagement of the hegemonic forces of global capitalism that endowed photography's transparency with unprecedented truth-value. This article seeks to consider how early photography in the Middle East operated on several semiotic, social, and historical layers. The photograph's manifest surface reproduced ideologies and performed or 'enacted' subjectivities that were congruent with the hegemony of nahda discourses (discourses of progress that covered every topic from child rearing, gender roles and governance to how to develop a photograph). I borrow the term enact (and enactment) from clinical psychology to build on the speech-act theory of performativity in order to fully illustrate how photography was a social and subjective practice that manifested a particular epistemology and perspective of modernity rather than specifically producing it. http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123 May 2015 If photography was a performance or enactment, then, simultaneously, the staging, performance, and language of photography also holds latent content; a history of how ideology became intelligible and how performative subjectivities carried value upon their enactment. [7] This latent level, then, is a history of displacements, violence, and the arcane. Thus, this article explores how the performative nature of photography and of the nahda photograph-the ideology that it enacted-was charged to stabilize, or at least contain, the latent violence and displaced lived-experiences that haunted photography's positivist representation. A Tale of Two Brothers If two poles, the manifest and the latent, mark the nineteenth century 'Arab' photograph, they are animated by the life and work of photographer Jurji Saboungi and his older brother, Louis, both born in Diyarbakir, or Mardin. The opposite trajectories of these two Saboungi lives mirror more than the careers each chose, rather reflecting the tension within nineteenth century nahda photography. Louis was the provocateur, opportunist, and intellectual-activist, gallivanting from adventure to adventure and opportunity to opportunity. Jurji on the other hand was staid and rooted: Beirut's most prominent photographer to Ottoman political and economic elites, Syria's 'middle stratum', the city's intellectual pantheon and most respected personalities and religious communities.[8] Some sources say that Jurji (1840-1910), also self-identified as Georges Saboungi. He opened his studio in Beirut in 1862, only two years after Trancrède Dumas-the first European to do so in the city. Fouad Debbas contends that Saboungi opened in 1878. He states that after apprenticing for years in the famed Beirut atelier Maison Bonfils, Saboungi assisted Félix Bonfils during his expeditions to Egypt and Palestine between 1867-1874. Debbas also contends that Saboungi opened in Sahat al-Qamh (Wheat Square) in Beirut after Félix returned to France because of health problems.[9] No matter the date, Jurji certainly learned photography, at least initially, from his famed brother Louis in the early 1860s. Consequently, Jurji, according to Carney Gavin, 'effectively started the Lebanese photographic industry… an industry which solely relied on local photographers.'[10] Jurji was an uncontroversial fixture of photography in the Arab Ottoman provinces. While he maintained a thriving studio in Beirut, Jurji Saboungi was mobile throughout the Ottoman Empire and, perhaps, Europe. He married a Danish woman and opened a studio at Assour Square (Sahat al-Sur, named after the old city wall), next to the train station, which is now Place de Riad al-Solh.[11] By the 1890s, his studio had moved to the Suq Sursock, in the shadow of the famous palatial maison of the Sursock family, built by Musa (Mousa) Sursock, a successful http://www.ibraaz.org/essays/123

Islamophobia: The U.S. Campaign Against Muslims

Al-Kawakibi: From Political Journalism to a Political Science of the ‘Liberal’ Arab Muslim

Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2017

The Love of a Woman and a Nation: Desire, Progress, and Reform in Salim al-Bustani's Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sham

Canadian review of comparative literature, 2010

Discusses the formative influences on Salim al-Bustani's novel "Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sha... more Discusses the formative influences on Salim al-Bustani's novel "Al-Huyam fi Jinan al-Sham" (Passion in the Damascene Gardens), often considered the first modern Arabic novel. "Salim's romance expresses how Arabic literature was a fundamental space in which to contest colonial intrusions and, in so doing, configure new possibilities for an Arab subjective ideal, that can be both progressive and authentic."

Foundations of Modern Arab Identity

Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of &... more Dynamic and original, this study of the formation of modern Arab identity discusses the work of "pioneers of the Arab Renaissance," both renowned and forgotten - a pantheon of intellectuals, reformers, and journalists whose writing until now has been mostly untranslated. Against the backdrop of European imperialism in the Arab world, these literati planted the roots of modernity though their experiments in language, rhetoric, and literature. In both fiction and nonfiction they generated a radically new sense of Arab identity. At the same time, Sheehi argues, they created the terrain that produced an Arab preoccupation with "failure" and a perception of Western "superiority" - the terms intellectuals themselves used in the 19th century in diagnosing their cultural crisis. Neglected by historians, this ambivalent and contradictory state of consciousness is at the heart of the ideology of Arab identity, Sheehi says, and describes a variety of subjective po...

Duplicity and Fear

With Stones in Our Hands

Vaporizing white innocence: confronting the affective-aesthetic matrix of desiring witnessing

Subjectivity, 2020

In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect tha... more In this article, we mobilize a theoretical and political critique to the aesthetic and affect that informs "white innocence" and its attempts at "witnessing" the pain of the Other. Engaging with the work of Black critical race theorists (most prominently, Hortense Spillers and Amber Jamilla Musser), we put the artistic interventions of Hannah Black and Parker Bright critique of Dana Shutz's "Open Casket" in conversation with Teresa Margolles's "Vaporization." In doing so, we explore the epistemological, affective and aesthetic dimensions of the desire of whiteness to transcend its own matrix of race-power. We argue that Black's and Bright's interventions are refusals to accept or be the object of the desire for redemption, collaboration, and recuperative forgiveness. Margolles's Vaporization, on the other hand, compels to engage the space, corporality, and epistemology of flesh and forms by thinking through the multiplicities of embodiment as experienced through art and social productions. Margolles opens possibilities for us to think about fugitive moments of material, subjectivity, and social entanglements within institutionalized alienation itself that are otherwise re-metabolized by white innocence and the global art space.

The Transnational Palestinian Self: Toward Decolonizing Psychoanalytic Thought

Psychoanalytic Perspectives, 2018

This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting ... more This discussion considers Palestinian subjectivity in a perpetual state of doubleness, commuting between a number of transnational political and cultural contexts and positions. Engaging Lama Khouri's "Through Trump's Looking Glass into Alice's Wonderland: On Meeting the House Palestinian," this paper reveals how, on one hand, Zionism is intricately and inextricably linked with and haunted by a Palestinian identity, which it fundamentally works to negate; on the other hand, it also engages the ideological aspects of Palestinian Arab identity when it is transplanted to the United States, interpolating all identities through its racialized social and class hierarchy. In examining the structures of these binary identity systems, I gesture toward a decolonializing psychoanalysis that adopts psychoanalytic tools to understand how alienating two-ness can become a productive mode of confronting and dismantling Zionist objectification and radicalized othering.

Miki Kratsman and Ariella Azoulay. The Resolution of the Suspect. Cambridge, Mass.: Radius Books, 2016. 216 pp

Critical Inquiry, 2018

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine (Intro)

by Stephen Sheehi and Lara Sheehi

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, Jan 2022

Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and libe... more Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and liberatory psychoanalysis, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi platform the lives, perspectives, and insights of psychoanalytically inflected Palestinian psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, centering the stories that non-clinical Palestinians have entrusted to them over four years of community engagement with clinicians throughout historic Palestine.

Sheehi and Sheehi document the stories of Palestinian clinicians in relation to settler colonialism and violence but, even more so, in relation to their patients, communities, families, and one another (as a clinical community). In doing so, they track the appearance of settler colonialism as a psychologically extractive process, one that is often effaced by discourses of "normalization," "trauma," "resilience," and human rights, with the aid of clinicians, as well as psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine unpacks the intersection of psychoanalysis as a psychological practice in Palestine, while also advancing a set of therapeutic theories in which to critically engage and "read" the politically complex array of conditions that define life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Celia Brickman, Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind

Psychoanalysis and History, 2020

Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresol... more Celia Brickman's book Race in Psychoanalysis: Aboriginal Populations in the Mind holds an unresolved tension that weaves in and out of Freud's foundational theory of the human psyche. On the one hand, Freud 'attempted to transcend the racial taxonomies of his time by creating a model of the psyche as held in common by all humans' (p. 9). On the other hand, this universal psyche emerges from an epistemology of modernity that could only posit the psyche along a developmental axis of 'progress,' proceeding from 'primitivity' to civilized. While Freud contended that the 'primitive actually lived on in the structures of contemporary European subjectivity and institutions,' Freud's term 'primitivity,' although affirming 'the universal commonality of the psyche,' was a 'racially indexed term of derogation he used to discredit the pretensions of civilization' (p. 5). Brickman carefully shows us that, no matter how meticulous Freud was to illustrate that 'the universality of the primitive psyche was found in both primitive and civilized people alike,' he inevitably 'pressed into service the available colonialist constructions concerning primitive peoples' (p. 119). In chapter 1, Brickman tracks the appearance and interrelationship between racial terms such as 'primitive,' 'savage,' 'barbarian,' 'heathen,' and 'infidel' within Western Enlightenment thought and colonial anthropology. These terms were gradated within civilizational discourses that undergirded the preeminence of European selfhood in order to justify colonialism, imperialism, genocide, and enslavement. Brickman is concerned with the rise of 'theories of the primitive mind' as 'both sites of European self-fashioning and the fashioning of the other […] in tandem with the development of the modern concept of civilization' (p. 37). She shows how these terms were associated with biological determinism in the works of a series of influential nineteenth-century European philosopherpseudoscientists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Hebert Spencer, and Ernst Haeckel. Paying attention to the work of Bartolemé de Las Casas, she observes how the idea of the 'Noble Savage' establishes the 'primitive'who is always nonwhite-'both outside civilization but also prior to it' (p. 33). By noting the temporal-evolutionary schema of psychoanalysis, Brickman convincingly shows in chapter 2 how Freud squarely rooted psychoanalytic thought in nineteenth-century social-evolutionary thought of 'phylogenetic

Fanon in Palestine: The Settler's Town Is a Strongly Built Town

International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2020

This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work... more This article emerges from one collaboration with Palestinian clinicians while presenting the work of Frantz Fanon to a group of training clinicians in the Maana Center of EMMS Nazareth Hospital in Nazareth (al‐Nasirah). Reading and discussing Fanon in Palestine with Palestinian clinicians and trainees elicited deepseated feelings of affirmation and validation, while also disclosing anxieties arising from colonial alienation, as Fanon would say. At the same time, Fanon conjures in Palestine an affirming and empowering spirit that, inevitably, results in a consideration of how Palestinian indigeneity, no matter how mediated by regimes of domination and control, recenters itself as a repost to the extractive psychological and material violence that constitutes settler colonialism; in this case, Zionism. Adopting a decolonial methodology, we came to understand how psychological theory and practice provides Palestinian clinicians a means to work for selfawareness within a regime of oppression. Centering indigenous lives, their relationships to their own collectives and communities, and their relationship the psychopathy of settler colonial structures, produced critical psychological and social knowledge.

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine, 2022

The book is Open Access, published by University of California Press: https://luminosoa.org/site/... more

Journal of Visual Culture: The JVC Palestine Portfolio

by Jae Emerling, Stephen Sheehi, marquard smith, hanan toukan, Mazen Kerbaj, Mahmoud M Alshaer, Susan Greene, Ariel Caine, Lina Hakim, and Sunaina Maira

Journal of Visual Culture, 2021

Journal of Visual Culture, 2021 http://www.journalofvisualculture.org The JVC Palestine Portfoli... more Journal of Visual Culture, 2021
http://www.journalofvisualculture.org

The JVC Palestine Portfolio is an incredibly powerful, heartfelt, heart-wrenching, life-affirming and hopeful polyphony of reminiscences, art works, graphic designs, scholarly texts, critical writings, briefings, visual activism, petitions, and mobilisations. Thanks to Sage, it is free to access, and is available to download (and circulate widely, if you’re so inclined) on the Sage site (https://journals.sagepub.com/home/vcu) and here.

The JVC Palestine Portfolio with contributions by: Larissa Sansour, Rashid Khalidi, Mazen Kerbaj, The Mosaic Rooms, Strike MoMA, Ariella Azoulay, Danah Abdulla, Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso, Hanan Toukan, Zeina Maasri, Adrian Lahoud and Jasbir K. Puar, Yoav Galai, Distributed Cognition Cooperative (Anna Engelhardt and Sasha Shestakova), Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Firas Shehadeh, Sami Khatib, Léopold Lambert/The Funambulist, Tina Sherwell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Rochelle Davis and Dan Walsh, Lina Hakim, Ariel Caine, Nida Sinnokrot/Sakiya, Yara Sharif, Visualizing Palestine, Nada Dalloul, Simone Browne, Rehab Nazzal, Lila Sharif, Oraib Toukan and Mohmoud M Alshaer, Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Omar Kholeif, Oreet Ashery, The Palestinian Museum, Kareem Estefan and Nour Bishouty, Ghaith Hilal Nassar, Adam Broomberg, Kamal Aljafari, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Palestinian Feminist Collective, W.J.T. Mitchell, Dar El-Nimer for Arts and Culture, Jill H. Casid, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Stephen Sheehi, Susan Greene, Sunaina Maira, and Shourideh C. Molavi and Eyal Weizman.

Preface:

The JVC Palestine Portfolio

Journal of Visual Culture’s Editorial Collective has a longstanding commitment to tracking and analyzing critically the continued unfolding of racialist, colonialist, and jingoistic discourses. The journal often provides a critical space wherein these discourses can be researched and debated so as to redress the social, political, and ethical injustices that continue to plague the world we share. Everything we do in this journal exists under the sign of Stuart Hall’s vital challenge: ‘We must mobilise everything [we] can find in terms of intellectual [and other] resources in order to understand what keeps making the lives we live and the societies we live in profoundly and deeply antihumane in their capacity to live with difference’.

As a Collective, then, we stand in solidarity with Palestinians against Israeli settler colonialism and the Apartheid that results from it.

Compelled to respond to the urgency of the moment instigated by the Israeli regime’s actions in Gaza in May and June 2021, which we also acknowledge as a part of the ongoing Nakbah and an extension of official policies of displacement and erasure since 1948, we sent out an email with the subject line: ‘Journal of Visual Culture for Palestine: a call to [name of recipient]’, asking for a favour, for cooperation, for a contribution. The email in full is as follows:

Download to read on...

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine SAMPLE

by Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, 2021

https://www.routledge.com/Psychoanalysis-Under-Occupation-Practicing-Resistance-in-Palestine/Shee... more

Introduction: Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (Sample)

by Stephen Sheehi and Lara Sheehi

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine, 2022

Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and libe... more Heavily influenced by Frantz Fanon and critically engaging the theories of decoloniality and liberatory psychoanalysis, Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi platform the lives, perspectives, and insights of psychoanalytically inflected Palestinian psychologists, psychiatrists, and other mental health professionals, centering the stories that non-clinical Palestinians have entrusted to them over four years of community engagement with clinicians throughout historic Palestine.

Sheehi and Sheehi document the stories of Palestinian clinicians in relation to settler colonialism and violence but, even more so, in relation to their patients, communities, families, and one another (as a clinical community). In doing so, they track the appearance of settler colonialism as a psychologically extractive process, one that is often effaced by discourses of "normalization," "trauma," "resilience," and human rights, with the aid of clinicians, as well as psychoanalysis.

Psychoanalysis Under Occupation: Practicing Resistance in Palestine unpacks the intersection of psychoanalysis as a psychological practice in Palestine, while also advancing a set of therapeutic theories in which to critically engage and "read" the politically complex array of conditions that define life for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation.

Arab Imago: Social History of Portrait Photography 1860-1910

Arab Imago: Social History of Portrait Photography 1860-1910, 2016

The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle Eas... more The birth of photography coincided with the expansion of European imperialism in the Middle East, and some of the medium's earliest images are Orientalist pictures taken by Europeans in such places as Cairo and Jerusalem—photographs that have long shaped and distorted the Western visual imagination of the region. But the Middle East had many of its own photographers, collectors, and patrons. In this book, Stephen Sheehi presents a groundbreaking new account of early photography in the Arab world.

The Arab Imago concentrates primarily on studio portraits by Arab and Armenian photographers in the late Ottoman Empire. Examining previously known studios such as Abdullah Frères, Pascal Sébah, Garabed Krikorian, and Khalil Raad, the book also provides the first account of other pioneers such as Georges and Louis Saboungi, the Kova Brothers, Muhammad Sadiq Bey, and Ibrahim Rif'at Pasha—as well as the first detailed look at early photographs of the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. In addition, the book explores indigenous photography manuals and albums, newspapers, scientific journals, and fiction.

Featuring extensive previously unpublished images, The Arab Imago shows how native photography played an essential role in the creation of modern Arab societies in Egypt, Palestine, Syria, and Lebanon before the First World War. At the same time, the book overturns Eurocentric and Orientalist understandings of indigenous photography and challenges previous histories of the medium.

Stephen Sheehi is the Sultan Qaboos bin Said Chair of Middle East Studies at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of Foundations of Modern Arab Identity and Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign against Muslims.

Endorsements:

"We have been waiting for effective global histories of photography to disturb and decenter the questions we ask--not globalized histories, radiating out in a familiar narrative of export, influence, and derivation, but histories that start elsewhere. Stephen Sheehi’s The Arab Imago, a social history of indigenous photography in the Ottoman Arab world, is a model for this. It provincializes the history we have and irrevocably pluralizes both photographies and the interwoven modernities of which they were part."--John Tagg, Binghamton University, author of The Disciplinary Frame: Photographic Truths and the Capture of Meaning

"Hugely original, both empirically and theoretically, this is a superbly ambitious book. Sheehi helps the reader escape from the familiar landscape of colonial representation into the complex terrain of indigenous photography, which is filled with images and practices that will provoke new kinds of debates. The Arab Imago disorders a world we thought we knew in ways that will be highly productive."--Christopher Pinney, University College London, author of Photography and Anthropology

"The Arab Imago is a remarkable and timely book that will make a significant contribution to Middle East studies and to the theory and history of photography. Sheehi’s discussion of indigenous photography in the Arab world sheds new and much-needed light on photography’s other histories."--Ali Behdad, UCLA, author of Camera Orientalis: Reflections on Photography of the Middle East

"The Arab Imago successfully presents us with an alternative history of photography in the Arab world during the late Ottoman Empire. This original and informative book will be an important source for scholars and students of photography and Middle Eastern modernity."--Issam Nassar, Illinois State University, author of European Portrayals of Jerusalem

الاسلاموفوبيا: الحملة الايديولوجية ضد المسلمين ،لكاتب ستيفن شيهى (اسطفان شيحا) و لمترجمة فاطمة نصر (القاهر: دار السطور٢٠١٢

Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims

Foundations of Modern Arab Identity

Predatory Mediocrity : How Racist Pseudo-Academics Intend to Do Harm and Incite Violence against Scholars of Color

BARRICADE: A JOURNAL OF ANTIFASCISM (to be submitted), 2024

Why do washed up white North American academics and opportunists turn reactionary? Is it ou... more Why do washed up white North American academics and opportunists turn reactionary? Is it out of opportunism or is there something reactionary fundamental in their earlier work? Do they feel betrayed by their fields and professional organizations that either ignore them, belittle them, or find their predatory behavior unethical? What is it in these academics that make them walk the not so thin line between legality and libel, and predation and “critique”? What makes ideologues so unethical as to leverage their academic bona fides (as slim as they may be) to ingratiate themselves with right wing, even white supremist and fascists, forces (both state and non-state).

How is it that so many of these right-wing has-been academics are the worst time of committed right wing Zionists, so off the pale that even mainstream Israelis tend to avoid and disavowal them? Why is it that these failed (almost always male and white) academics become obsessed with progressive women, often women of color? And why is it that white feminists who often cape for white patriarchal power (including misogynistic Zionism in the form of the anti-women policies of the state of Israel) avoid calling out their predatory stalking, harassment, and creepy surveillance of these women of color.

This forthcoming article considers these questions in seriousness. Without psychopathologizing behavior that has otherwise been described as “unhinged,” the article discusses how failed academics target scholars of color and scholars of conscience who advocate for progressive causes in order to establish themselves in academic fields in which they have failed. Most frequently, these mediocre polemicists (almost always middle aged to retired white men) target high profile, productive, ground-breaking, and accomplished scholars around issues of Palestine and trans rights.

This paper will largely focus on the fields of psychoanalysis and cultural studies, choosing a handful of American, British, and Canadian ideologues whose otherwise puerile and unacademic attacks pose for "academic" critiques, which attempt to "cancel" progressive academics under the justification of "free academic speech". This paper is academic and bends away from the same sort of ad hominem attacks these sleazy wash-ups launch on scholars of conscience.

I will argue that these predatory opportunists manufactor or seek out to exacerbate and politicize what they then constitute as scandals. Their arguments are caped as a critique of “authoritarian wokeness” that threatens to upend white and male authority, thereby unleashing the debauchery of those who support trans and queer rights, the working poor, black and brown people and, of course, those who support Palestinian rights to self determination.

The "fault lines" within psychoanalysis as a field and, to some degree, "cultural studies" is one around a pedantic posture of what is intentionally misidentified as "identity politics." Therefore, the argument of this article will be twofold. These ideological hacks and pseudo-academics actively work to intimidate, harm, and incite violence against these scholars of conscience by flooding both the public sphere (via social media) and through their membership in and relationships with members in professional organizations. Likewise, what are the mechanisms that these failed academics that are not flunkies of state power use to harass and seek to harm their targets? How do they conscript and manipulate equally-unethical and ideologically committed students and internet-trolls, to quote an unnamed source, to “make their life [that of the targeted professor] a hell”?

Secondarily, these harassment and incitement campaigns offer talentless polemists and failed academics one last opportunity to gain celebrity and relevance for themselves in ways that their previous “scholarship” failed to do. While most credible scholars dismiss any work by these hack and rogue academics (as I have called them in other publications), their opportunism serves to establish their reputation in a small but dedicated community of ideologically motivated reactionaries, committed to silencing academic freedom.

The argument of this article builds on my previous work on "Teaching in the Teeth of Power" (found in Islamophobia: The Ideological Campaign Against Muslims [2011] and Anthony Nocella et al, ed Academic Repression [2010]). Like Islamophobia, this article will be supported by a myriad of sources: personal interviews, social media data and primary sources.

Sources will include personal writings and correspondences and documents exchanged between these predatory opportunistic academics, students (who collude with them), right wing organizations, and Israeli groups as well as court and legal records (for example, within psychology some of these predatory ideologues have lost their licenses in Canada and the United States because of ethics violation). Since these "scholars" work never undergoes actual peer review, I will be also discussing their on-line writing that they claim is "peer-reviewed" but is not but rather appear in highly ideological platforms usually run by singular people who have an clear academic agenda.

However, in a world marked by the mainstreaming of fascism (and the capitulations of the liberal parties), this article shows how these mediocre opportunists intentionally operationalize the climate of terror against progressive voices in order to amplify the impact of their slander to ostracize these scholars of conscience within academic institutions and professional organizations if not also incite bodily harm against them.