The Middle East and Brazil

Description

New ties across regions in the Global South

Like the Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa series page on Facebook

Connections between Brazil and the Middle East have a long history, but the importance of these interactions has been heightened in recent years by the rise of Brazil as a champion of the global south, mass mobilizations in the Arab world and South America, and the cultural renaissance of Afro-descendant Muslims and Arab ethnic identities in the Americas. This groundbreaking collection traces the links between these two regions, describes the emergence of new South-South solidarities, and offers new methodologies for the study of transnationalism, global culture, and international relations.

Introduction Paul Amar

Part I. South-South Relations, Security Politics, Diplomatic History
1. The Middle East and Brazil: Transregional Politics in the Dilma Rousseff Era Paul Amar
2. The South America-Arab States Summit: Historical Contexts of South-South Solidarity and Exchange Paulo Daniel Farah
3. Brazil's Relations with the Middle East in the "Oil Shock" Era: Pragmatism, Universalism, and Developmentalism in the 1970s Carlos Ribeiro Santana
4. Palestine/Israel Controversies in the 1970s and the Birth of Brazilian Transregionalism Monique Sochaczewski
5. Terrorist Frontier Cell or Cosmopolitan Commercial Hub? The Arab and Muslim Presence at the Border of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina Fernando Rabossi

Part II. Race, Nation and Transregional Imaginations
6. Tropical Orientalism: Brazil's Race Debates and the Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
7. Slave Barracks Aristocrats: Islam and the Orient in the Work of Gilberto Freyre Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
8. Islamic Transnationalism and Anti-Slavery Movements: The Malê Rebellion as Debated by Brazil's Press, 1835-1838 José T. Cairus
9. Brazil and Its Middle Eastern Populations: A Transnational Intellectual Sphere María del Mar Logroño Narbona
10. The Politics of Anti-Zionism and Racial Democracy in Homeland Tourism John Tofik Karam
11. Rio de Janeiro's Global Bazaar: Syrian, Lebanese, and Chinese Merchants in the Saara Neiva Vieira da Cunha and Pedro Paulo Thiago de Mello
12. Muslim Identities in Brazil: Engaging Local and Transnational Spheres Paulo Gabriel Hilu da Rocha Pinto

Part III. Literature and Transregional Media Cultures
13. Telenovelas and Muslim Identities in Brazil Silvia M. Montenegro
14. Turco Peddlers, Brazilian Plantationists, and Transnational Arabs: The Genre Triangle of Levantine-Brazilian Literature Silvia C. Ferreira
15. Multiple Homelands: Heritage and Migrancy in Brazilian Mahjari Literature Armando Vargas
16. Orientalism in Milton Hatoum's Fiction Daniela Birman
17. Arab-Brazilian Literature: Alberto Mussa's Mu'allaqa and South-South Dialogue Waïl Hassan

Sujets

• Middle Eastern Studies
• Middle Est
• HISTORY
• POLITICAL SCIENCE
• Histoire
• América del Sur
• History of the Middle East
• General officer
• Globalization
• South America
• Middle East
• Latin America
• History of the Americas
• General

Informations

• Publié par: Indiana University Press
• Date de parution: 15 juillet 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780253014962
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

THE MIDDLE EAST AND BRAZIL
Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, editors
THE MIDDLE EAST AND BRAZIL
Perspectives on the New Global South
EDITED BY PAUL AMAR
This book is a publication of
INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS Office of Scholarly Publishing Herman B Wells Library 350 1320 East 10th Street Bloomington, Indiana 47405 USA
iupress.indiana.edu
Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931
2014 by Indiana University Press Chapter 6 Ella Shohat Robert Stam All rights reserved
No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences-Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z 39.48-1992.
Manufactured in the United States of America
Cataloging information is available from the Library of Congress
The Middle East and Brazil : perspectives on the new global south / edited by Paul Amar.
pages cm. - (Public cultures of the Middle East and North Africa)
ISBN 978-0-253-01223-4 (cl) - ISBN 978-0-253-01227-2 (pb) - ISBN 978-0-253-01496-2 (eb) 1. Middle East-Relations-Brazil. 2. Brazil-Relations-Middle East. 3. Muslims-Brazil-History. 4. Muslims-Brazil-Ethnic identity. 5. Brazil-Ethnic relations-History. 6. Transnationalism-Social aspects-Brazil. 7. Transnationalism-Political aspects-Brazil. 8. Transnationalism in literature. 9. Brazilian literature. I. Amar, Paul (Paul Edouard), 1968- author, editor of compilation.
DS 63.2. B 6 M 54 2014
303.48 281056-dc23
2014017132
1 2 3 4 5 19 18 17 16 15 14
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction Paul Amar
Part One. South-South Relations, Security Politics, Diplomatic History
1 The Middle East and Brazil: Transregional Politics in the Dilma Rousseff Era Paul Amar
2 The Summit of South America-Arab States: Historical Contexts of South-South Solidarity and Exchange Paulo Daniel Elias Farah
3 Brazil s Relations with the Middle East in the Oil Shock Era: Pragmatism, Universalism, and Developmentalism in the 1970s Carlos Ribeiro Santana
4 Palestine-Israel Controversies in the 1970s and the Birth of Brazilian Transregionalism Monique Sochaczewski
5 Terrorist Frontier Cell or Cosmopolitan Commercial Hub? The Arab and Muslim Presence at the Border of Paraguay, Brazil, and Argentina Fernando Rabossi
Part Two. Race, Nation, and Transregional Imaginations
6 Tropical Orientalism: Brazil s Race Debates and the Sephardi-Moorish Atlantic Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
7 Slave Barracks Aristocrats: Islam and the Orient in the Work of Gilberto Freyre Alexandra Isfahani-Hammond
8 Islamic Transnationalism and Anti-Slavery Movements: The Mal Rebellion as Debated by Brazil s Press, 1835-1838 Jos T. Cairus
9 A Transnational Intellectual Sphere: Brazil and Its Middle Eastern Populations Mar a del Mar Logro o Narbona
10 The Politics of Anti-Zionism and Racial Democracy in Homeland Tourism John Tofik Karam
11 Rio de Janeiro s Global Bazaar: Syrian, Lebanese, and Chinese Merchants in the Saara Neiva Vieira da Cunha and Pedro Paulo Thiago de Mello
12 Muslim Identities in Brazil: Engaging Local and Transnational Spheres Paulo Gabriel Hilu da Rocha Pinto
Part Three. Literature and Transregional Media Cultures
13 Telenovelas and Muslim Identities in Brazil Silvia M. Montenegro
14 Turco Peddlers, Brazilian Plantationists, and Transnational Arabs: The Genre Triangle of Levantine-Brazilian Literature Silvia C. Ferreira
15 Multiple Homelands: Heritage and Migrancy in Brazilian Mahjari Literature Armando Vargas
16 Orientalism in Milton Hatoum s Fiction Daniela Birman
17 Arab-Brazilian Literature: Alberto Mussa s Mu allaqa and South-South Dialogue Wa l S. Hassan
Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments
This collective, transregional, and transdisciplinary conversation began under the best of conditions thanks to the intelligence, vision, and hospitality of Paulo Gabriel Hilu da Rocha Pinto, professor of anthropology at the Federal University Fluminense in Rio de Janeiro, with whom I founded the Center for Middle East Studies in 2003. I thank him for his continued leadership in these areas, for his support to this team of scholars in the years since, and for his friendship. For the production of this ambitious volume itself, I would like to thank Paul A. Silverstein, Susan Slyomovics, and Ted Swedenburg, the editors of this special series at Indiana University Press, Public Cultures of the Middle East and North Africa, for moving beyond traditional approaches to the region, and embracing the new world of histories, cultures, politics, and methods we offer. Also, I would like to thank Indiana University Press Sponsoring Editor Rebecca Tolen for her enthusiasm and all her hard work that made this book a reality. And I would like to convey my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and the members of the editorial board whose insights and suggestions improved each of these chapters, and refined the profile of this book.
Most of all, I would like to thank Silvia Ferreira, whose research and production assistance during the last two years has been truly incredible. Her intelligence, patience, language skills, and organizational capacity-not to mention her cutting-edge grasp of the scholarly issues and familiarity with the communities embraced by this project-have ensured the high quality of this volume.
THE MIDDLE EAST AND BRAZIL
Introduction
Paul Amar
What lies behind Brazil s new affiliations with the Middle East, and South America s attempts to unite, economically and politically, with the Arab League in order to counterbalance U.S. and Global North hegemony? How can we explain the sudden explosion of visibility and creativity among Brazil s approximately sixteen million citizens who are descendants of Syrio-Lebanese and other Arab migrants or who are practicing Muslims? From where erupted this wave of interest among Arab leaders and Middle Eastern social movements who are looking to Brazil as a model for democracy and a beacon for Global South leadership? Which histories, literatures, and cultures have provided the foundation for these new forms of transnational imagination and solidarity?
This book appears at a time in which shifting global orderings and ties between continental regions of the Global South and East are being reconfigured around newly visible, large-scale processes and shifting flows of power, imagination, and activism. This is an era in which Brazil is increasingly asserting itself on the world stage, hosting the World Cup (2014) and the Olympic Games (2016), serving as bridge builder between emergent regions of the Global South, and striving diplomatically to rival the old North Atlantic-centered geopolitical models. And Brazil is reaching out commercially and culturally to the Middle East, often through the initiatives of merchants, culture makers, and entrepreneurs descended from Arab migrants who have been integrated in the Americas for generations. This is also an era in which Middle Eastern leaders and peoples, with unprecedented enthusiasm, are reaching out to Brazil as a trade partner that can help counterbalance the old economic dominance of the West or provide alternatives to the intensifying presence of China. Also, the peoples of Turkey, Iran, and in particular the countries that have recently been transformed by the uprisings of the Arab Spring are also turning their gaze toward South America. In this context, Brazil offers new models of democratization, demilitarization, and global solidarity that appeal (often in idealized forms) to changing polities in the Middle East that are striving to break free of an age of West-supported dictatorships, anti-terrorism campaigns, and devastating wars and occupations.
But when did this sudden wave of new connections appear on the international agenda and trigger the interest of scholars, social movements, and policymakers?
Changing Worlds
In December 2003, Brazil s then recently inaugurated president Luiz In cio Lula da Silva found himself backed into a corner. He was facing the challenges of stabilizing his government in an atmosphere of domestic and international crisis: narcotrafficking and paramilitary violence exploding at home and in neighboring Colombia; revolutions sweeping through Venezuela and Bolivia; U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan overturning diplomatic alliances and rocking Brazil s commercial prospects and investor contracts in the region; global security experts naming Brazil as a harbor for new kinds of terrorism; and international bankers attacking the credibility of Lula s government and Brazil s economy. Yet in the midst of these challenges, Lula made a surprising move: he flew to the Middle East.
During his visit to Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and Dubai in 2003, President Lula launched a series of high-level negotiations that continued to evolve over the decade, aiming to economically, culturally, and geopolitically integrate the nations of the South American Common Market (Mercosur, which unites Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and now Venezuela) with the countries of the Arab League. These negotiations also aimed to establish new cultural, educational, and security cooperation between Brazil and the Middle East. Brazil went to the Middle East-as wars ra