PPR434 Diasporas and Minorities of the Middle East

Objectives

This course will introduce the popular concept of Diaspora to Middle Eastern Studies generally, while encouraging students to consider the importance of minorities, identities and migration of the region. Through extensive cases studies the programme traces how minority groups of the Middle East are organised and engaged politically outside their countries of origin, examining their transnational linkages and the effects of these connections on their 'homelands' and 'host states'. The course also looks at how communities are built and sustained in a diasporic space, examining issues of identity, representation, citizenship and belonging in a globalized world. Underlying the course are fundamental questions about being rooted and routed, belonging, displacement, community, citizenship and state and the effects of globalisation on identities. The course will looks at cases such as :

• The Jews: the 20th century diaspora
• The Armenian Diaspora: From Exile to Empowerment?
• The Greeks: Modern Exodus
• The Palestinian Diaspora
• Christian Communities in the Middle East
• 'New' diasporic communities in the Gulf
• The Turkish and Kurdish diaspora in Europe
• Middle Eastern Diasporas and transnational communities in 'the West'

Select Bibliography

Butenschon, Nils, Uri Davis and Emanuel Hassassian (eds.), Citizenship and the State in the Middle East (Syracuse University Press 2000).

Chatty, Dawn (2010) Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East. Cambridge University Press

Hourani, Albert (1947) Minorities in the Arab world. London: Oxford University Press

Levy, Andre and Alex Weingrod (Eds.) (2005) Homelands and Diasporas. Stanford University Press: Stanford, California

Masters, Bruce (2001) Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab world: the roots of sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Levy, André and Alex Weingrod (Eds.) (2005) Homelands and Diasporas - Holy Lands and Other Places. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press.

Hammer, Juliane, Palestinians Born in Exile – Diaspora and the Search for a Homeland. Austin: Texas, 2005.

Bakalian, Anny and Mehdi Bozorgmehr (2009) Backlash 9/11: Middle Eastern and Muslim Americans Respond. University of California Press

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