Country and City in the Modern Middle East

Undergraduate / Graduate

In The Country and the City, Raymond Williams surveyed a dizzying repertoire of literary and visual imagery to show that this seemingly elemental conceptual binary was a product of industrial capitalism. Rather than "the country" being a primitive and unsullied domain infringed upon by "the city," an exogenous modernizing juggernaut, Williams invited us to consider how both categories were made and remade, relationally, through a crescendo of interconnected, social and economic processes. As in Williams' area of study, England, the modern Middle East similarly underwent a dramatic reordering of space, place and conceptual vocabulary as it was incorporated unevenly into the global economy from the 18th through the 20th centuries. With some notable exceptions, the urban and rural parts of this transformation have been covered separately in the historiography. This course aims to consider them synthetically and to explore the prospects for theorizing, with the benefit of a range of interdisciplinary case studies, a shared conceptual framework for the transformation of city and country in the Modern Middle East.