EthnicRacial Minorities MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Rather than taking for granted what a minority population is, this course critically examines processes of minoritization and racialization across the SWANA / MENA region. We will interrogate the social and political contexts through which processes of othering are advanced, challenged, and sustained by a host of actors. In the process, this course analyzes key terms and categories deployed within and outside of the region, including sect, religion, ethnicity, race, indigeneity, settler-colonialism, Bedouin, bidoun, and others. Through ethnographies, articles, historical works, films, and podcasts, the class will chart different modes that are deployed to racialize and minoritize communities, including the governance of spaces, borders, and mobilities, via citizenship regimes, and along the vectors of class, gender, and race. We will assess how key analytical concepts travel across the region and how they relate to wider global political economic frameworks. Students will come out of the class with a firm understanding of how the organization of populations and of territories go hand in hand with processes of minoritization and racialization; how widespread assumptions about the relation between language and nationhood conceal key mechanisms of differentiation within local, national, regional contexts; and how identity and security regimes are intimately related in both highly visible and intangible ways.