Hjem
Historie
Emner

Temaomtale HIM105

Fordjuping i Midtaustens historie

Amusement Park in Baghdad, 1940s
Amusement Park in Baghdad, 1940s.
Foto/ill.:
Kamil and Rifat Chadirji Photographic Archive, MIT, Boston

Hovedinnhold

 

Våren 2024 tilbys følgende tema på HIM105:

Leisure, Pleasure, and Entertainment in the Middle East

The history of the Middle East is often told as a long line of battles, sectarian conflicts, political events, and failed attempts to create democratic societies. Such historical narratives offer little information about culture, fun, and the daily lives of ordinary people. This course highlights everyday perspectives, experiences, and voices often left out or made invisible by traditional political and state-centered histories of the Middle East. In this course we will investigate what happens when we foreground historical actors, concepts, and categories that academics usually confine to afterthoughts and/or footnotes in discussions about the Middle East. What alternative histories can we write if we structure our analysis of the Middle East around leisure, pleasure, and entertainment? What happens if we begin to narrate the past and present in ways that foreground fun, popular culture, and everyday life?

This course focuses on leisure, pleasure, and entertainment in the modern Middle East (nineteenth century until today). Throughout the course we will examine the emergence of new leisure forms, sites, and practices and investigate how local, regional, and global events shaped the cultural life and political life of Middle Eastern societies and their intercultural and intercommunal relations, including encounters and friction We will also examine how broad historical processes such as modernization, urbanization, and the emergence of national identities, shaped local leisure patterns in ways that had a profound and lasting impact on ordinary people’s daily lives. Students will also analyse the interrelationship between leisure and other social constructs such as work, family, community, and nation. How did categories of ethnicity, gender, and class organize and reshape institutions and practices of leisure culture and vice versa?

Through lectures, discussions, collaborative assignments, and close readings of a wide selection of secondary and primary sources, students will examine and confront several topics related to leisure, pleasure, and entertainment in different urban centers of the Middle East. These include public and private space, cafés, cinemas, beaches, popular culture, mood- and mind-altering stimulants, nightlife, consumption, fashion, sex, and desire.