“Culture, Conflict, and the City in the Middle East” is an interdisciplinary course that interrogates the vibrant cultural productivity of some of the major urban centers of the Arab world. Using the major Arab cities of the Eastern Mediterranean as case studies, the course will introduce students to the modern cultural history of this part of the world, through an examination of cultural manifestations of protest, war, urban displacement, and forced migration. The course focuses on literature, film, and visual art produced in this region from the second half of the twentieth century until the present, and asks students to interrogate how cities like Beirut, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Amman have shaped artists’ creativity, as well as how their works interpret the messy and rapid processes of modern urbanization. It will examine how Arabic cultural narratives have imagined ways of belonging to urban space, remembered (and forgotten) violence that took place there, and defined who is an insider and outsider. Other topics include the representation of various forms of identity and belonging in texts that take place in these settings, and how modern political ideologies are debated by urban cultural producers in their works.

The course readings are organized by city and theme. Aside from the primary cultural texts (novels, poetry, films, and visual art) readings will cover the urban humanities, modern Arabic cultural production, theories of representation, memory studies, and the environmental humanities.

After the course ends on the Rutgers-Newark campus, there will be a two-week onsite component in Amman, Jordan. During this time students will attend seminars with scholars, writers, and artists, some of whose works they will have recently encountered throughout the course. Students will also have walking tours of Amman, and trips to Um Qais, Wadi Rum, and Petra that focus on issues covered in class (e.g., how the city chooses to memorialize or forget events, cultural heritage, the impact of climate change on city life, refugee communities, etc.), and a short crash course in colloquial Levantine Arabic. This extension of the RU-N classroom will be an intensive, experiential learning course that brings the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells of the texts directly to students.

Course Outcomes

The course has several learning objectives. On the Newark campus students will:

• Learn about the relationship between culture and politics in an important part of the Middle East

• Learn to write politically and historically informed analyses of cultural texts from this part of the world
• Improve skills in close reading and analytical writing about the arts in context

In Amman, the students will have the opportunities to:

• Gain valuable on-site experience learning about culture, politics, and society in one of the most important cities in the Middle East by visiting the spaces that they will have read about

• Hear directly from writers, artists, and filmmakers about their creative process, their relationship to the place that inspires their work, and their collaboration with translators
• Learn the basics of the spoken Arabic of the Levant or improve their level of Modern Standard Arabic.