The New Yorker on Nadia Abu El-Haj
The April 14th edition of _The New Yorker_ includes a long piece on the controversy surrounding Nadia Abu El-Haj, an anthropology professor whose tenure case became caught up in contemporary politics in the Middle East when the topic of her book, the politics of archaeology in Israel, became known to alumni of Barnard, where she teaches. It is a good article and — as far as I can tell from my vantage point far, far from Manhattan — balanced. The timing was fortuitous for me, since my class just finished reading her book _Facts on the Ground_. The response was, I’ll admit, not positive — the topic is pretty distant from local concerns in Hawai’i, and the academic writing and close detail can be off-putting for undergraduates. But I mention the New Yorker piece here since in the future if people are interested in ‘teaching the controversy’ as they teach the book it will be a good resource to them (its not online, unfortunately). I also mention it because I imagine (wrongly?) that all I have to do to get an active comment thread on this post is to say Abu El-Haj’s name out loud and people will have an opinion so… did anyone else read the article, and what did they think?
Well, we know that CKelty liked the article too:
http://savageminds.org/2008/04/14/more-anthropologists-in-the-news/
Wow I totally managed to miss Chris’s earlier post… sorry for the double posting!
I was just in Cairo meeting with a Palestinian publisher based in Damascus. He’s the head of Cadmus Press which publishes a lot of Western scholarly literature in translation, and he also reviews English language books for Al-Jazeera (see his recent review of Fear Up Harsh here: http://www.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/73EBFA18-531C-49D8-95B0-AECDEFE22AA8.htm). We were talking about the anthropology of archaeology and we got to talking about Abu El-Haj. He was very familiar with her book and I told him that he should translate it and publish it in Arabic, if it wasn’t already. But he said that he wasn’t really interested because she was Palestinian. Why? It was because, he told me, he thought that an argument like the one Abu El-Haj makes isn’t as powerful when it comes from a Palestinian as when it comes from an Israeli or Jewish academic (he mentioned Ilan Pappe as an example). Isn’t that depressing to hear an argument like that coming from a Palestinian who used to work for the PLO?
Looks interesting.
Please add a link to The New Yorker article.
While not available on the New Yorker website, the article has been posted to MESA.