Pop Cult/Power/Identity: MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Popular Culture, Power, & Identity: Ethnography of Media and Minorities of the Middle East This graduate seminar will examine the dynamics of popular culture and mass media in the Middle East, including the Arabic-speaking nations, Israel, Turkey, Iran, and North Africa. Although performative and expressive arts, mass media, and popular culture have previously been dismissed as epiphenomenal in Middle Eastern Studies, this course proceeds from the idea that popular culture and performance are in fact foundational means for negotiating power and resistance, social interactions between ethnic/religious groups, and intersectional identity. Popular culture and performance practices as communicative events through which social relations are organized, constituted, and critiqued. Our readings build upon fundamental anthropological understandings of social groups, of structure and agency, and of power in social life. Students will confront the many ways in which popular culture has had a formative and foundational impact on conceptions of self and others in the Middle East with special regard to religious and ethnic minorities in the region. Ethnographic case studies will explore expressions of resistance, consent, and belonging of ethnoreligious and minority communities across the Middle East. This course asks students to evaluate differing expressions of belonging by Ethiopian Israelis, Lebanese Christians, Moroccan Berber, Turkish Secular Muslims, Egyptian Copts, Golani Druze, Iraqi Shi’a, and more. This course takes a special interest in Druze throughout the Middle East and how they negotiate forms of belonging decided on national and local levels.