Nature, Power Identity: MENA

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

Visions of revamped natures and sanitized communities were common across the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, as they are today. Governments of many stripes attempted to “improve” environments, to “modernize” rural economies, and to mold national identities. This course examines the wielders of social, economic, political and environmental power who transformed the modern MENA region, and the human and non-human actors that challenged them. It studies the utopian designs of empires and newly powerful states, and the alternate ways of living that these governments attempted to eradicate. It travels from high plateaus to malarial swamps, and from fertile plains to dry deserts, to interrogate the relationship between nature, power, and identity in the modern societies of the Middle East and North Africa. Several questions guide the course. What is the relationship between nature and power in the modern Middle East and North Africa? What imaginaries about the region’s environments have shaped social life, state policies and practices, and outsiders’ approaches to the region? The Middle East and North Africa are commonly grouped together for cultural and historical reasons—is there an environmental unity to this broad space as well? And finally, how global is the environmental history of the modern Middle East and North Africa?