Middle East Critique

From the simultaneous outrage and mockery that accompanied footage of American soldiers clumsily exiting Afghanistan, to the contrasting reactions of indignation and pride displayed by Twitter users when Lionel Messi was enrobed by the Qatari bisht after winning the World Cup, mediation processes increasingly deploy and collapse geographies, temporalities, and time zones. We may question, however, whether the evident transnational and translocal mediation of affect and emotion means that feelings have become unmoored from particular histories and geographies.  The disparate emotive responses that a singular event produces, the prevalence of certain responses over others, and their archiving at the expense of the rest, indicate that emotions and affective attachments, both as practices, and as aspects of individual and collective identity, are far from universal (Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). 

We are therefore interested in approaches toward politics, culture and media, at the local, regional, global, or transnational levels, which reflect on and problematise ideas around emotional attachments and affective registers that exceed universalistic interpretations, and contribute to the broader project of bringing decolonial and postcolonial studies into conversation with affect and emotion studies. Our Special Issue is guided by the overarching questions: 

• To what extent is the ‘turn to affect’ observed across social science and humanities disciplines predicated upon an orientation towards Western and Eurocentric epistemes? 
• In what ways have Middle Eastern societies and media, and those of the Global South more generally, been excluded from affect and emotion studies, and how can this exclusion be addressed? 

We encourage submissions which explore aspects of these problematics, through bringing to bear a critical attention to the intersections of the affective with embodied, gendered, racialized, and classed subjectivities, geographies, and histories in their relation to structures of power. While notions of atmospheres, hauntings and glitches (Nassar 2023), have been drawn on to map the experiences of Southern geographies and urban spaces, and the concepts of affective and intimate publics have been used to understand the asymmetric dynamics of transnationally mediated encounters, more sustained and collaborative intersectional and postcolonial interventions are needed which will enable affect and emotion studies to be conducted on the basis of de-Westernized fine-grained analysis.

 

For this special issue of Middle East Critique, abstracts may be submitted on any topic related to this theme that directly includes an analysis of the affective dimensions of gendered, racialized, and classed geographies, histories and/or mediation processes. These topics may include (but are not limited to) the following:

 

• Counter-Archives 
• Felt and Embodied Knowledges 
• Vernacular Discourse 
• The Anthropocene/ New Materialism(s)/ Post-humanism and Digitization 
• The Shifting Affective Boundaries of Mediations/Geographies/Temporalities
• Mediation and Artificial Intelligence 

Affect, Bodies and Surveillance

Authors should submit a 250-word abstract and CV by email to the journal's Editor, Matteo Capasso [[email protected]] and SI guest editors, Sara Tafakori [[email protected]] and Sabiha Allouche [[email protected]].

We aim for a special issue of 7-9 original articles, preceded by an introduction by the editors. Selected authors are expected to submit an original article of 8000 words.

Instructions for AuthorsSubmit an Article