Joseph Massad
Encyclopedia
Joseph Andoni Massad (born 1963) is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University
, whose academic work has focused on Palestinian
, Jordan
ian, and Israel
i nationalism
. He is also known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world
.
Massad, a Palestinian
, was born in Jordan
in 1963. He received his PhD in Political Science
from Columbia in 1998.
. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.
Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, Colonial Effects argues that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on institutions of law, the military, and education as key components of nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.
Colonial Effects was critically praised both by several senior academics in Middle East Studies, including Edward Said
who described the book as "a work of genuine brilliance," and by scholars of nationalism such as Partha Chatterjee, Amr Sabet, and Stephen Howe, the last of whom called the book "among the most sophisticated and impressive products" of recent studies in the field. The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals and, according to Betty Anderson
, one of the book’s reviewers, it has become staple reading on syllabi of nationalism and Middle East politics university courses across the United States
and Europe
.
John Chalcraft of the University of Edinburgh
described Massad's analysis of the impact of colonial subjection on modern Jordanian nationalism as "a major contribution to the literature on Jordanian nationalism, anticolonial nationalism, and the wider field of postcolonial studies;" he also criticizes the paucity of information Massad offers on how "the mass of the population [who] barely get a mention in Massad's account," fared in this history: He finds that in Massad's account "there is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another."
.
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism
and Palestinian nationalism
from a variety of angles, including race, gender
, culture
, ethnicity, colonialism
, anti-Semitism
, and nationalist ideology
. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism
in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism’s own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."
The book has received praise from scholars Ilan Pappé
and Ella Shohat
as well as from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi
. Shohat praised the book as a "timely and engaging volume" that "makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debate over Zionism and Palestine." Pappé saw the book as a "courageous intellectual exercise" and as "a thought provoking book that forces us to reverse our conventional images and perceptions about Palestine's history and future."
Other scholars situated the book’s contribution in relation to European history and to the work of Edward Said. University of Pennsylvania
political science professor Anne Norton
wrote:
In his review in Nations and Nationalism, Israeli scholar Ephraim Nimni wrote that "like his intellectual mentor, Massad reminds us of a long and honourable tradition of Jewish Intellectuals who could only envisage the solution to the Jewish Question through universal emancipation. It seems that Massad, and the late Edward Said, are existential Diaspora Jews of the old kind...The book is also fastidiously referenced, showing the erudition of the author and his command of the voluminous Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as the classics of Jewish history".
. Desiring Arabs won Columbia University's 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award, awarded by a jury of students on the grounds that it “offers a probing study of representations of Arab sexuality" and is "an important and eloquent work of scholarship that the committee feels will have a lasting impact on the field.”
Desiring Arabs is an intellectual history of the Arab world and its Western representations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book makes contributions to a number of academic and theoretical fields. It extends Said’s study of Orientalism by analyzing the latter’s impact on Arab intellectual production; it links Orientalism to definitions and representations of sex and desire and in doing so provides a colonial archive to the sexual question that has hitherto been missing; it approaches the literary as the limits of imagining the future; and puts forth the question of translation as a central problem in Euro-American studies of the other.
Massad argues that "Western male white-dominated" gay activists, under the umbrella of what he terms the "Gay International," have engaged in a "missionary" effort to impose the binary categories of heterosexual/homosexual into cultures where no such subjectivities exist, and that these activists in fact ultimately replicate in these cultures the very structures they challenge in their own home countries. Massad writes that "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."
Talal Asad
, professor of Anthropology at CUNY
, described it as a "remarkable book, at once a fascinating history of ideas and a brilliantly analyzed case study of cultural imperialism....[It] is quite stunning." Anton Shammas
, professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan
, praised the book as an "elaborate, relentless, and unabashed" critique of Arab intellectual production on the question of sex and desire, "the most interesting and equally illuminating commentaries on modern Arab culture to be published in the past decade." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University
blurbed the book in the following terms. "This compendious study of the discursive production of an Arab sexuality incorporates new readings of the modernity/tradition debates that go well beyond a specifically Arab context, and moves all the way from historical research into the history of literature and literary criticism. Even as it supplements Edward Said
's work by its consideration of Arab Orientalism, Desiring Arabs boldly looks forward to an unscripted future."
Ferial Ghazoul reviewed the book in the Journal of Arabic Literature, stating that Desiring Arabs"is a brilliant text with a breadth of knowledge and sophisticated analytical techniques... Massad's interdisciplinary approach, dense prose, impeccable research, and above all the thought-provoking issues he raises make his book a scholarly landmark...As a student of the late Edward W. Said and as Desiring Arabs was dedicated to Said..., Massad has certainly learned the lessons of Said, his critical innovation, his scholarly meticulousness, and his virtuoso style."
Feminist scholar Joan Scott, a professor of history at Princeton
, describes the book as "an inspired and erudite intellectual history, complex, nuanced, critical, and deeply engaged." Scott comments that Massad refuses both an essentialized opposition between Arab and Western civilization and an all-embracing universalism offered in the name of human rights. Instead, she writes, Massad insists that representations of Arab sexuality must be understood historically, as the outcome of the encounter between Arab and Orientalist writers. In her review of the book in the Arab Studies Journal, feminist scholar Marnia Lazreg, a professor of sociology at CUNY, wrote, "This truly monumental book is a corrective to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality that inexplicably omitted the role played by the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions and constructions of sexuality... [Desiring Arabs] is an epoch-making book". Khaled El-Rouayheb of Harvard University called the book: "A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected
topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work."
Samia Mehrez, a professor of Arabic Literature at the American University in Cairo writes in the Journal of Gender Studies
: "Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad is an impressive project that ventures into uncharted territory and can be read as a complement to both Edward Said's Orientalism and Michel Foucault's work on sexuality. Like all of Massad's work, Desiring Arabs investigates the discursive and institutional continuum through which culture is 'invented' under both colonial rule through colonial practices that sought to reify racial and religious differences as well as through the cultural politics of the post-colonial nation state and its efforts to consolidate the nation, national identity, and national belonging."
While there has been a clear consensus on the book's significant scholarly contributions, some of the book's theses have also been criticized by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a freelance writer and reviewer living in Beirut, who concedes that Massad makes a few good points, but observes that "Massad’s relativism - stemming from his accurate observation that ‘homosexuality’ is alien to Arab same-gender sexual traditions - is so extreme that he refuses to support a call for universal freedom of sexual identity." Al-Shawaf argues that, "In postulating the inevitability of (heterosexual) Arab violence wherever there is gay and lesbian assertiveness, Massad pre-emptively exonerates the perpetrators - whether individuals or the state - of any wrongdoing. However regrettable their behaviour, those Arabs who react violently to the gay rights campaign are not perceived by Massad as responsible for their actions, but as caught up in a broader struggle against ‘imperialism’, to which the gay rights movement is wedded."
in his 1978 book Orientalism
, Massad asserts that 19th Century European anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews have transformed in the present era to target Arabs, while maintaining the same racialist characterizations, and thus, racism
towards Arabs and Muslims today is a form of "Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and...Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism." Massad bases this belief on an understanding of anti-Semitism as a specific historical phenomenon originating in Europe, rather than simply as hatred of Jews; he writes: "...the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smack of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."
)" as an example of Israeli "racism."
Massad has spoken of genetic links being established between 19th century European Jews and the ancient Israelite
kingdom and the creation of a "semitic" identity for Jews at that time as actually a European, racist construction designed to portray European Jews as foreigners. Massad considers claims to Israel made by the Zionists movement based on that connection to be "problematic." In a debate with Israeli historian Benny Morris
, Massad said:
thesis, saying, "the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East." Massad is especially critical of "rabidly pro-Israeli American President Obama."
Massad views US culture as deeply infected with racism and misogyny, tying the Abner Louima
case to torture in Abu Ghraib
, and arguing that in Iraq, "American male sexual prowess, usually reserved for American women, [was] put to military use in imperial conquests", with "Iraqis... posited.. as women and feminised men to be penetrated by the missiles and bombs ejected from American warplanes." Massad concludes that "the content of the word 'freedom' that American politicians and propagandists want to impose on the rest of the world is nothing more and nothing less than America's violent domination, racism, torture, sexual humiliation, and the rest of it."
Massad has also criticized Arab intellectuals who "defend the racist and barbaric policies" of the United States
, the International Monetary Fund
and the World Bank
in the Arab world
.
the “chief Palestinian collaborator,” and accuses the PA of collaborating with Israel and the United States to crush Palestinian resistance.
The Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, which concluded its work in April 2005, dismissed most of the allegations against Massad, writing in its report that it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom." and stated that they "found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic." The committee found it credible that Massad was angered by a question in class from a student that he understood to be defending Israel's conduct toward Palestinians and that his response "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism." but it also described an environment of incivility, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies.
Critics described the committee's findings as a whitewash. A speaker for the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom, called the committee's finding that statements made were not anti-Semitic "deeply insulting", not because he believed it to be false but because student complaints were about intimidation, rather than racism. Some had previously complained that the committee contained members who, in their opinion, had "anti-Israel views" and personal connections to Massad.
In response to the investigation of Massad and other professors by Columbia, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union
, expressed concern that it would become an inquisition into the political views of professors, and that there was a "political agenda" motivating the complaints. Lieberman previously had met with some of the Columbia students who have made the allegations featured in Columbia Unbecoming and said in an interview that it was "wrong to accept these allegations at face value".
Massad continues to deny the one allegation that the report found "credible." Two students beside his accuser said that they witnessed the incident, but a teaching assistant said on WNYC
in April 2005 that she was present and that Massad did not angrily criticize the student in question; after the release of the report, 20 students signed a letter stating that they were in class on the day of the alleged incident, and that the incident had never happened.
In an editorial discussing the case one week after the release of the Committee report, the New York Times noted that, while it believed Massad had been guilty of inappropriate behavior, it found the controversy overblown and professors such as Massad themselves victimized:
, was the subject of a libel suit in Britain
. In the review, Massad accused Ankori of illegitimately appropriating the work of Kamal Boullata
, a Palestinian artist and art historian, a charge which Ankori viewed as defamatory.
The review appeared in Art Journal
, a publication of the College Art Association
of America, (CAA). To settle the suit out of court, the CAA agreed to issue an apology to Ms. Ankori, to pay her $75,000.00 and to send a letter to its institutional subscribers, stating that the Massad review “contained factual errors and certain unfounded assertions.” Massad acknowledged "minor errors", but not libel, and accused the CAA of cowardice. CAA executive director Linda Downs told the Forward that, while "there were mistakes" in the review, the journal agreed to pay only because it could not afford to fight out the case.
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
, whose academic work has focused on Palestinian
Palestinian nationalism
Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people. It has roots in Pan-Arabism and other movements rejecting colonialism and calling for national independence. More recently, Palestinian Nationalism is expressed through the Israeli–Palestinian conflict...
, Jordan
Jordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
ian, and Israel
Israel
The State of Israel is a parliamentary republic located in the Middle East, along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean Sea...
i nationalism
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
. He is also known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world
Arab world
The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
.
Massad, a Palestinian
Palestinian people
The Palestinian people, also referred to as Palestinians or Palestinian Arabs , are an Arabic-speaking people with origins in Palestine. Despite various wars and exoduses, roughly one third of the world's Palestinian population continues to reside in the area encompassing the West Bank, the Gaza...
, was born in Jordan
Jordan
Jordan , officially the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan , Al-Mamlaka al-Urduniyya al-Hashemiyya) is a kingdom on the East Bank of the River Jordan. The country borders Saudi Arabia to the east and south-east, Iraq to the north-east, Syria to the north and the West Bank and Israel to the west, sharing...
in 1963. He received his PhD in Political Science
Political science
Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...
from Columbia in 1998.
Colonial Effects (2001)
Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University PressColumbia University Press
Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...
. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.
Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, Colonial Effects argues that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on institutions of law, the military, and education as key components of nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.
Colonial Effects was critically praised both by several senior academics in Middle East Studies, including Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
who described the book as "a work of genuine brilliance," and by scholars of nationalism such as Partha Chatterjee, Amr Sabet, and Stephen Howe, the last of whom called the book "among the most sophisticated and impressive products" of recent studies in the field. The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals and, according to Betty Anderson
Betty Anderson
Betty Anderson is a fictional character in the novel Peyton Place, written by Grace Metalious, as well as the subsequent films and TV series based on the novel. In the film, she was played by actress Terry Moore; and in the TV series, she was portrayed by actress Barbara Parkins; in the short-lived...
, one of the book’s reviewers, it has become staple reading on syllabi of nationalism and Middle East politics university courses across the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
and Europe
Europe
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
.
John Chalcraft of the University of Edinburgh
University of Edinburgh
The University of Edinburgh, founded in 1583, is a public research university located in Edinburgh, the capital of Scotland, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The university is deeply embedded in the fabric of the city, with many of the buildings in the historic Old Town belonging to the university...
described Massad's analysis of the impact of colonial subjection on modern Jordanian nationalism as "a major contribution to the literature on Jordanian nationalism, anticolonial nationalism, and the wider field of postcolonial studies;" he also criticizes the paucity of information Massad offers on how "the mass of the population [who] barely get a mention in Massad's account," fared in this history: He finds that in Massad's account "there is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another."
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006)
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by RoutledgeRoutledge
Routledge is a British publishing house which has operated under a succession of company names and latterly as an academic imprint. Its origins may be traced back to the 19th-century London bookseller George Routledge...
.
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism
Zionism
Zionism is a Jewish political movement that, in its broadest sense, has supported the self-determination of the Jewish people in a sovereign Jewish national homeland. Since the establishment of the State of Israel, the Zionist movement continues primarily to advocate on behalf of the Jewish state...
and Palestinian nationalism
Palestinian nationalism
Palestinian nationalism is the national movement of the Palestinian people. It has roots in Pan-Arabism and other movements rejecting colonialism and calling for national independence. More recently, Palestinian Nationalism is expressed through the Israeli–Palestinian conflict...
from a variety of angles, including race, gender
Gender
Gender is a range of characteristics used to distinguish between males and females, particularly in the cases of men and women and the masculine and feminine attributes assigned to them. Depending on the context, the discriminating characteristics vary from sex to social role to gender identity...
, culture
Culture
Culture is a term that has many different inter-related meanings. For example, in 1952, Alfred Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn compiled a list of 164 definitions of "culture" in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions...
, ethnicity, colonialism
Colonialism
Colonialism is the establishment, maintenance, acquisition and expansion of colonies in one territory by people from another territory. It is a process whereby the metropole claims sovereignty over the colony and the social structure, government, and economics of the colony are changed by...
, anti-Semitism
Anti-Semitism
Antisemitism is suspicion of, hatred toward, or discrimination against Jews for reasons connected to their Jewish heritage. According to a 2005 U.S...
, and nationalist ideology
Nationalism
Nationalism is a political ideology that involves a strong identification of a group of individuals with a political entity defined in national terms, i.e. a nation. In the 'modernist' image of the nation, it is nationalism that creates national identity. There are various definitions for what...
. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism
Terrorism
Terrorism is the systematic use of terror, especially as a means of coercion. In the international community, however, terrorism has no universally agreed, legally binding, criminal law definition...
in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism’s own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."
The book has received praise from scholars Ilan Pappé
Ilan Pappé
Ilan Pappé is a professor with the College of Social Sciences and International Studies at the University of Exeter in the UK, director of the university's European Centre for Palestine Studies, co-director of the Exeter Centre for Ethno-Political Studies, and political activist...
and Ella Shohat
Ella Shohat
Professor Ella Habiba Shohat is Professor of Cultural Studies at New York University, and has taught, lectured and written extensively on issues having to do with Eurocentrism and Orientalism, as well as with postcolonial and transnational approaches to Cultural Studies...
as well as from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi
Walid Khalidi
Walid Khalidi is an Oxford University-educated Palestinian historian who has written extensively on the Palestinian exodus. He is General Secretary and co-founder of the Institute for Palestine Studies, established in Beirut in December 1963 as an independent research and publishing center...
. Shohat praised the book as a "timely and engaging volume" that "makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debate over Zionism and Palestine." Pappé saw the book as a "courageous intellectual exercise" and as "a thought provoking book that forces us to reverse our conventional images and perceptions about Palestine's history and future."
Other scholars situated the book’s contribution in relation to European history and to the work of Edward Said. University of Pennsylvania
University of Pennsylvania
The University of Pennsylvania is a private, Ivy League university located in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Penn is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States,Penn is the fourth-oldest using the founding dates claimed by each institution...
political science professor Anne Norton
Anne Norton
Anne Norton is an American professor of political science and comparative literature. She currently holds a chair in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.-Early life:...
wrote:
"Massad's brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions."
In his review in Nations and Nationalism, Israeli scholar Ephraim Nimni wrote that "like his intellectual mentor, Massad reminds us of a long and honourable tradition of Jewish Intellectuals who could only envisage the solution to the Jewish Question through universal emancipation. It seems that Massad, and the late Edward Said, are existential Diaspora Jews of the old kind...The book is also fastidiously referenced, showing the erudition of the author and his command of the voluminous Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as the classics of Jewish history".
Desiring Arabs (2007)
Massad's third book, Desiring Arabs, was published in 2007 by the University of Chicago PressUniversity of Chicago Press
The University of Chicago Press is the largest university press in the United States. It is operated by the University of Chicago and publishes a wide variety of academic titles, including The Chicago Manual of Style, dozens of academic journals, including Critical Inquiry, and a wide array of...
. Desiring Arabs won Columbia University's 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award, awarded by a jury of students on the grounds that it “offers a probing study of representations of Arab sexuality" and is "an important and eloquent work of scholarship that the committee feels will have a lasting impact on the field.”
Desiring Arabs is an intellectual history of the Arab world and its Western representations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The book makes contributions to a number of academic and theoretical fields. It extends Said’s study of Orientalism by analyzing the latter’s impact on Arab intellectual production; it links Orientalism to definitions and representations of sex and desire and in doing so provides a colonial archive to the sexual question that has hitherto been missing; it approaches the literary as the limits of imagining the future; and puts forth the question of translation as a central problem in Euro-American studies of the other.
Massad argues that "Western male white-dominated" gay activists, under the umbrella of what he terms the "Gay International," have engaged in a "missionary" effort to impose the binary categories of heterosexual/homosexual into cultures where no such subjectivities exist, and that these activists in fact ultimately replicate in these cultures the very structures they challenge in their own home countries. Massad writes that "The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."
Academic impact
Desiring Arabs has received critical praise from academics for its contributions both to the analysis of Arab culture and to the theory of sexuality.Talal Asad
Talal Asad
Talal Asad is an anthropologist at the City University of New York.Asad has made important theoretical contributions to post-colonialism, Christianity, Islam, and ritual studies and has recently called for, and initiated, an anthropology of secularism...
, professor of Anthropology at CUNY
City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, with its administrative offices in Yorkville in Manhattan. It is the largest urban university in the United States, consisting of 23 institutions: 11 senior colleges, six community colleges, the William E...
, described it as a "remarkable book, at once a fascinating history of ideas and a brilliantly analyzed case study of cultural imperialism....[It] is quite stunning." Anton Shammas
Anton Shammas
-Biography:Anton Shammas was one of six children born to Hanna Shammas, a Palestinian Christian barber and shoemaker,and a Lebanese mother who moved to Fassuta in 1936 to teach French at the local girls' school...
, professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Michigan
University of Michigan
The University of Michigan is a public research university located in Ann Arbor, Michigan in the United States. It is the state's oldest university and the flagship campus of the University of Michigan...
, praised the book as an "elaborate, relentless, and unabashed" critique of Arab intellectual production on the question of sex and desire, "the most interesting and equally illuminating commentaries on modern Arab culture to be published in the past decade." Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is an Indian literary critic, theorist and a University Professor at Columbia University. She is best known for the essay "Can the Subaltern Speak?", considered a founding text of postcolonialism, and for her translation of Jacques Derrida's Of Grammatology. She...
, Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities, Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
blurbed the book in the following terms. "This compendious study of the discursive production of an Arab sexuality incorporates new readings of the modernity/tradition debates that go well beyond a specifically Arab context, and moves all the way from historical research into the history of literature and literary criticism. Even as it supplements Edward Said
Edward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
's work by its consideration of Arab Orientalism, Desiring Arabs boldly looks forward to an unscripted future."
Ferial Ghazoul reviewed the book in the Journal of Arabic Literature, stating that Desiring Arabs"is a brilliant text with a breadth of knowledge and sophisticated analytical techniques... Massad's interdisciplinary approach, dense prose, impeccable research, and above all the thought-provoking issues he raises make his book a scholarly landmark...As a student of the late Edward W. Said and as Desiring Arabs was dedicated to Said..., Massad has certainly learned the lessons of Said, his critical innovation, his scholarly meticulousness, and his virtuoso style."
Feminist scholar Joan Scott, a professor of history at Princeton
Princeton University
Princeton University is a private research university located in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. The school is one of the eight universities of the Ivy League, and is one of the nine Colonial Colleges founded before the American Revolution....
, describes the book as "an inspired and erudite intellectual history, complex, nuanced, critical, and deeply engaged." Scott comments that Massad refuses both an essentialized opposition between Arab and Western civilization and an all-embracing universalism offered in the name of human rights. Instead, she writes, Massad insists that representations of Arab sexuality must be understood historically, as the outcome of the encounter between Arab and Orientalist writers. In her review of the book in the Arab Studies Journal, feminist scholar Marnia Lazreg, a professor of sociology at CUNY, wrote, "This truly monumental book is a corrective to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality that inexplicably omitted the role played by the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions and constructions of sexuality... [Desiring Arabs] is an epoch-making book". Khaled El-Rouayheb of Harvard University called the book: "A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected
topic. . . . I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work."
Samia Mehrez, a professor of Arabic Literature at the American University in Cairo writes in the Journal of Gender Studies
Journal of Gender Studies
The Journal of Gender Studies is a leading British peer-reviewed scientific journal for interdisciplinary gender studies, published by Routledge. It has been published since 1991, and publishes articles relating to gender from a feminist perspective covering a wide range of disciplines....
: "Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad is an impressive project that ventures into uncharted territory and can be read as a complement to both Edward Said's Orientalism and Michel Foucault's work on sexuality. Like all of Massad's work, Desiring Arabs investigates the discursive and institutional continuum through which culture is 'invented' under both colonial rule through colonial practices that sought to reify racial and religious differences as well as through the cultural politics of the post-colonial nation state and its efforts to consolidate the nation, national identity, and national belonging."
While there has been a clear consensus on the book's significant scholarly contributions, some of the book's theses have also been criticized by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a freelance writer and reviewer living in Beirut, who concedes that Massad makes a few good points, but observes that "Massad’s relativism - stemming from his accurate observation that ‘homosexuality’ is alien to Arab same-gender sexual traditions - is so extreme that he refuses to support a call for universal freedom of sexual identity." Al-Shawaf argues that, "In postulating the inevitability of (heterosexual) Arab violence wherever there is gay and lesbian assertiveness, Massad pre-emptively exonerates the perpetrators - whether individuals or the state - of any wrongdoing. However regrettable their behaviour, those Arabs who react violently to the gay rights campaign are not perceived by Massad as responsible for their actions, but as caught up in a broader struggle against ‘imperialism’, to which the gay rights movement is wedded."
On antisemitism
Following arguments made by Edward SaidEdward Said
Edward Wadie Saïd was a Palestinian-American literary theorist and advocate for Palestinian rights. He was University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and a founding figure in postcolonialism...
in his 1978 book Orientalism
Orientalism
Orientalism is a term used for the imitation or depiction of aspects of Eastern cultures in the West by writers, designers and artists, as well as having other meanings...
, Massad asserts that 19th Century European anti-Semitic characterizations of Jews have transformed in the present era to target Arabs, while maintaining the same racialist characterizations, and thus, racism
Racism
Racism is the belief that inherent different traits in human racial groups justify discrimination. In the modern English language, the term "racism" is used predominantly as a pejorative epithet. It is applied especially to the practice or advocacy of racial discrimination of a pernicious nature...
towards Arabs and Muslims today is a form of "Euro-American Christian anti-Semitism and...Israeli Jewish anti-Semitism." Massad bases this belief on an understanding of anti-Semitism as a specific historical phenomenon originating in Europe, rather than simply as hatred of Jews; he writes: "...the claims made by many nowadays that any manifestation of hatred against Jews in any geographic location on Earth and in any historical period is 'anti-Semitism' smack of a gross misunderstanding of the European history of anti-Semitism."
On Israel and Zionism
Massad has characterized Israel as "a racist Jewish state." In Massad's view, Zionism is not only racist but anti-Semitic, and anti-Semitic not only towards Arab Palestinians, but also towards Jews. Massad writes that after Europeans invented the racialist conception of the "Semite," the Zionist movement "adopted wholesale anti-Semitic ideologies", and describes Zionism as an "anti-Semitic project of destroying Jewish cultures and languages in the diaspora", which has ultimately led to "the transformation of the Jew into the anti-Semite, and the Palestinian into the Jew." Massad further accuses Zionists of unjustly "appropriating the fruit of the land that Palestinian peasants produced," and specifies the renaming of "Palestinian rural salad (now known in New York delis as Israeli saladIsraeli salad
Israeli salad is a chopped salad of finely diced tomato and cucumber. "Distinguished by the tiny diced tomatoes and cucumbers," it is described as the "most well-known national dish of Israel."...
)" as an example of Israeli "racism."
Massad has spoken of genetic links being established between 19th century European Jews and the ancient Israelite
Israelite
According to the Bible the Israelites were a Hebrew-speaking people of the Ancient Near East who inhabited the Land of Canaan during the monarchic period .The word "Israelite" derives from the Biblical Hebrew ישראל...
kingdom and the creation of a "semitic" identity for Jews at that time as actually a European, racist construction designed to portray European Jews as foreigners. Massad considers claims to Israel made by the Zionists movement based on that connection to be "problematic." In a debate with Israeli historian Benny Morris
Benny Morris
Benny Morris is professor of History in the Middle East Studies department of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in the city of Be'er Sheva, Israel...
, Massad said:
The claim made by the Zionists, and by Professor Morris, that late nineteenth-century European Jews are direct descendants of the ancient Palestinian Hebrews is what is preposterous here. This kind of anti-Semitic claim that European Jews were not European that was propagated by the racist and biological discourses on the nineteenth century, that they somehow descend from first-century Hebrews, despite the fact that they look like other Europeans, that they speak European languages, is what is absurd.
On the United States
Massad argues that US imperialism is ultimately behind Israeli actions. He has attacked the Israel LobbyIsrael lobby in the United States
The Israel lobby is a term used to describe the diverse coalition of those who, as individuals and as groups, seek and have sought to influence the foreign policy of the United States in support of Zionism, Israel or the specific policies of its government...
thesis, saying, "the lobby is powerful in the United States because its major claims are about advancing US interests and its support for Israel is contextualised in its support for the overall US strategy in the Middle East." Massad is especially critical of "rabidly pro-Israeli American President Obama."
Massad views US culture as deeply infected with racism and misogyny, tying the Abner Louima
Abner Louima
Abner Louima is a Haitian who was assaulted, brutalized and forcibly sodomized with the handle of a bathroom plunger by New York City police officers after being arrested outside a Brooklyn nightclub in 1997....
case to torture in Abu Ghraib
Abu Ghraib
The city of Abu Ghraib in the Baghdad Governorate of Iraq is located just west of Baghdad's city center, or northwest of Baghdad International Airport. It has a population of 189,000. The old road to Jordan passes through Abu Ghraib...
, and arguing that in Iraq, "American male sexual prowess, usually reserved for American women, [was] put to military use in imperial conquests", with "Iraqis... posited.. as women and feminised men to be penetrated by the missiles and bombs ejected from American warplanes." Massad concludes that "the content of the word 'freedom' that American politicians and propagandists want to impose on the rest of the world is nothing more and nothing less than America's violent domination, racism, torture, sexual humiliation, and the rest of it."
Massad has also criticized Arab intellectuals who "defend the racist and barbaric policies" of the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
, the International Monetary Fund
International Monetary Fund
The International Monetary Fund is an organization of 187 countries, working to foster global monetary cooperation, secure financial stability, facilitate international trade, promote high employment and sustainable economic growth, and reduce poverty around the world...
and the World Bank
World Bank
The World Bank is an international financial institution that provides loans to developing countries for capital programmes.The World Bank's official goal is the reduction of poverty...
in the Arab world
Arab world
The Arab world refers to Arabic-speaking states, territories and populations in North Africa, Western Asia and elsewhere.The standard definition of the Arab world comprises the 22 states and territories of the Arab League stretching from the Atlantic Ocean in the west to the Arabian Sea in the...
.
On the Palestinian Authority
Massad refers to the Palestinian Authority as the “Palestinian Collaborationist Authority,” calls Mahmoud AbbasMahmoud Abbas
Mahmoud Abbas , also known by the kunya Abu Mazen , has been the Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organisation since 11 November 2004 and became President of the Palestinian National Authority on 15 January 2005 on the Fatah ticket.Elected to serve until 9 January 2009, he unilaterally...
the “chief Palestinian collaborator,” and accuses the PA of collaborating with Israel and the United States to crush Palestinian resistance.
Columbia Unbecoming
In 2004, a pro-Israel activist organization, the David Project, produced a film, Columbia Unbecoming, interviewing students who claimed that Massad and other Columbia professors had intimidated or been unfair to them for their pro-Israel views. This eventually sparked the appointment of an Ad Hoc Grievance Committee by the university to investigate the complaints. In response to the film, United States Representative Anthony Weiner called on Columbia to fire Massad for what Weiner characterized as "anti-Semitic rantings."The Ad Hoc Grievance Committee, which concluded its work in April 2005, dismissed most of the allegations against Massad, writing in its report that it had "no basis for believing that Professor Massad systematically suppressed dissenting views in his classroom." and stated that they "found no evidence of any statements made by the faculty that could reasonably be construed as anti-semitic." The committee found it credible that Massad was angered by a question in class from a student that he understood to be defending Israel's conduct toward Palestinians and that his response "exceeded commonly accepted bounds by conveying that her question merited harsh public criticism." but it also described an environment of incivility, with pro-Israel students disrupting lectures on Middle Eastern studies.
Critics described the committee's findings as a whitewash. A speaker for the student group Columbians for Academic Freedom, called the committee's finding that statements made were not anti-Semitic "deeply insulting", not because he believed it to be false but because student complaints were about intimidation, rather than racism. Some had previously complained that the committee contained members who, in their opinion, had "anti-Israel views" and personal connections to Massad.
In response to the investigation of Massad and other professors by Columbia, Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union
New York Civil Liberties Union
The New York Civil Liberties Union is an civil rights organization in the United States. Founded in 1951 as the New York affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, it is a not-for-profit, nonpartisan organization with nearly 50,000 members across New York State.NYCLU's stated mission is to...
, expressed concern that it would become an inquisition into the political views of professors, and that there was a "political agenda" motivating the complaints. Lieberman previously had met with some of the Columbia students who have made the allegations featured in Columbia Unbecoming and said in an interview that it was "wrong to accept these allegations at face value".
Massad continues to deny the one allegation that the report found "credible." Two students beside his accuser said that they witnessed the incident, but a teaching assistant said on WNYC
WNYC
WNYC is a set of call letters shared by a pair of co-owned, non-profit, public radio stations located in New York City.WNYC broadcasts on the AM band at 820 kHz, and WNYC-FM is at 93.9 MHz. Both stations are members of National Public Radio and carry distinct, but similar news/talk programs...
in April 2005 that she was present and that Massad did not angrily criticize the student in question; after the release of the report, 20 students signed a letter stating that they were in class on the day of the alleged incident, and that the incident had never happened.
In an editorial discussing the case one week after the release of the Committee report, the New York Times noted that, while it believed Massad had been guilty of inappropriate behavior, it found the controversy overblown and professors such as Massad themselves victimized:
There is no evidence that anyone's grade suffered for challenging the pro-Palestinian views of any teacher or that any professors made anti-Semitic statements. The professors who were targeted have legitimate complaints themselves. Their classes were infiltrated by hecklers and surreptitious monitors, and they received hate mail and death threats. The panel had no mandate to examine the quality and fairness of teaching. That leaves the university to follow up on complaints about politicized courses and a lack of scholarly rigor as part of its effort to upgrade the department.
Ankori libel suit
A review by Massad of the book Palestinian Art, written by Israeli art history professor Gannit AnkoriGannit Ankori
Gannit Ankori is an Israeli art historian. She is Professor of Fine Arts and Chair in Israeli Art at the Department of Fine Arts at Brandeis University...
, was the subject of a libel suit in Britain
English defamation law
Modern libel and slander laws, as implemented in many Commonwealth nations as well as in the United States and in the Republic of Ireland, are originally descended from English defamation law...
. In the review, Massad accused Ankori of illegitimately appropriating the work of Kamal Boullata
Kamal Boullata
Kamal Boullata is a Palestinian artist and art historian. His works are primarily done in acrylic and abstract in style focusing on the ideas of division in Palestinian identity, separation from homeland through utilization geometric forms as well as integration of Arabic words and...
, a Palestinian artist and art historian, a charge which Ankori viewed as defamatory.
The review appeared in Art Journal
Art Journal (CAA)
Art Journal, established in New York in 1941, is a publication of the College Art Association of America . As a peer-reviewed, professionally moderated scholarly journal, its concentrations include:...
, a publication of the College Art Association
College Art Association
The College Art Association of America is the principal professional association in the United States for practitioners and scholars of art, art history, and art criticism...
of America, (CAA). To settle the suit out of court, the CAA agreed to issue an apology to Ms. Ankori, to pay her $75,000.00 and to send a letter to its institutional subscribers, stating that the Massad review “contained factual errors and certain unfounded assertions.” Massad acknowledged "minor errors", but not libel, and accused the CAA of cowardice. CAA executive director Linda Downs told the Forward that, while "there were mistakes" in the review, the journal agreed to pay only because it could not afford to fight out the case.
External links
- Profile at Columbia UniversityColumbia UniversityColumbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
- Column archive at Aljazeera English
- Column archie at The Electronic Intifada
- Distorting desire, Brian WhitakerBrian WhitakerBrian Whitaker has been a journalist for the British newspaper The Guardian since 1987 and its Middle East editor from 2000-2007. He is currently an editor on the paper's "Comment Is Free". He also writes articles for Guardian Unlimited, the internet edition of the paper...
reviews Desiring Arabs (2007)