Outside In: Marginality in the Modern Middle East

by Eugene Rogan (Editor)

The contributors to this book explore the boundaries of what constituted marginality in the eastern Mediterranean and how the notion of marginality changed with time. The essays view the individual in the context of his or her society within a specific time frame. With studies in Tunisia, Egypt, Palestine, Lebanon, Iraq, Ottoman Istanbul, and Salonica, the collection covers the breadth of the Mediterranean Muslim world. Most of the essays concentrate on the 19th and 20th centuries, and are organized around four broad prohibitions, institutions, port cities, and performers.

Genres: History

288 pages, Hardcover

First published July 25, 2002

About the author

Eugene Rogan is Director of the Middle East Centre at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford. He took his B.A. in economics from Columbia, and his M.A. and PhD in Middle Eastern history from Harvard. He taught at Boston College and Sarah Lawrence College before taking up his post in Oxford in 1991, where he teaches the modern history of the Middle East.

Reviews

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

Choking on the molten dogma of its own self-assured jargonicity, this collection of essays is only of minimal-to-middling worth. It is too ensconced in weird assumptions such as "psychiatry serving as yet another of the instruments of ordering and control by which European agents sought to colonise the Middle East", which is just a kind of tactical laziness that can't comprehend mentalities of the past outside its own trappings. It is also unintentionally funny, such as when one contributor proclaims "I concentrate on the body of the prostitute and present it as a 'text' through which the policies of the state and the prejudices and/or phobias of the organised society behind it can be 'read'."
...whatever!
What one would expect would be a collection of essays on folks not usually covered in the standard histories and a few selections are worth the slog (the chapter on entertainers in Baghdad is good!). However, what you come away with is a confusing mess that refuses to see folks as possessing their own agency (hookers as texts? Come on. Why not dig into why they're hookers? And what did that mean for society at large?) and attributes pernicious qualities (Imperialism drives all!) where there may, in fact, have been none.