Bøger af Julia Clancy-Smith

Winner of the Middle East Studies Association 2013 Undergraduate Education Award Utilizing a mix of documents--including photographs, posters, diaries, diplomatic records, archival sources, and literary works--The Modern Middle East and North Africa: A History in Documents is structured around an underlying theme of unity in diversity. This theme helps to offset students' stereotypical image of the Middle East and North Africa as an undifferentiated, monolithic, and unchanging part of the world inhabited mainly by terrorists and religious fanatics. Compiled and edited by two prominent historians, Julia Clancy-Smith and Charles Smith, the book's approach offers a compromise between conventional political and diplomatic histories and those focusing on social and cultural history. The authors demonstrate how the Middle East and North Africa have participated in and shaped the grand currents of global history during the past two centuries. Headnotes, extended captions, sidebars, introductory essays, and a robust photo program (including a documentary picture essay devoted to women and gender) provide an essential context framing the documents.

In December 2010 an out-of-work Tunisian merchant, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire and precipitated the Arab Spring. Popular interpretations of Bouazizi''s self-immolation viewed economic and political despair as the root of the Tunisian revolution, but as Julia Clancy-Smith points out Tunisia''s long history of revolutions and protest movements presents a far more complicated set of causes. Proposing a conceptual framework of "coastalization" v. "interiorization," Clancy-Smith examines Tunisia''s last two centuries and demonstrates how geographical and environmental and social factors also lie behind that country''s volatile history. Within this framework Clancy-Smith explores how Tunisia''s coast became a Mediterranean playground for transnational elites, a mecca of tourism, while its interior agrarian regions suffered increasing neglect and marginalization. This distinction has had a profound impact on the fate of Tunisia, and has manifested itself in divisive debates over politics and religion and gender that have lead to a series of mass civic actions that continue to this day. Clancy-Smith proposes a fresh historical lens through which to view the relationship between spacial displacements, regionalization, and transnationalism.