JADMAG Issue 1.1: Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula

Despite the sophisticated, critical, and oft-politically engaged literature emerging from and about the Arabian Peninsula the region remains marginalized, in multiple ways, within academic and popular analyses. Theorizing the Arabian Peninsula addresses the ways in which frameworks of knowledge production have not only obscured social realities there, but also contributed to their construction. While our roundtable contributors--activists, journalists, artists, and scholars such as Toby Jones, Adam Hanieh, Neha Vora, and others--approach this project from a number of different disciplinary perspectives and theoretical standpoints, several key themes surface from their critical engagements. The challenge for us, here, is to reconceptualize our objects of analysis to illuminate these power relations and the multiple ways in which they have effected far-reaching transformations of the political, cultural, and material infrastructures of everyday life in the Arabian Peninsula. Approaching knowledge, space, identity, economy, and the political as contested and historically constituted—as the contributors to this roundtable urge us to—thus serves to relocate the peninsula within broader circuits of power, capital, labor, migration, and religion, from which they have long been analytically severed.