{"id":5553,"date":"2014-11-24T00:14:45","date_gmt":"2014-11-24T05:14:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.martinkramer.org\/sandbox\/?p=5553"},"modified":"2014-11-24T00:14:45","modified_gmt":"2014-11-24T05:14:45","slug":"me-and-my-mesa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/2014\/11\/me-and-my-mesa\/","title":{"rendered":"Me and My MESA"},"content":{"rendered":"

This post first\u00a0appeared<\/a>\u00a0on the <\/em>Commentary blog on November 23.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"MESAOver the coming days, I\u2019ll be attending the Middle East Studies Association (MESA) annual conference in Washington. It\u2019s time for me to catch up on the zeitgeist<\/i> in my field, and there\u2019s no better place to do that than at MESA. It\u2019s been a long time\u2014to be precise, sixteen years\u2014since my last attendance at a MESA conference. MESA veterans might remember the occasion: Edward Said was being feted for his contribution (such as it was) to Middle Eastern studies. He was on the plenary podium, and I was in the audience. The British historian Robert Irwin hasn\u2019t forgotten<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I well remember the 1998 Middle East studies association meeting held in the Chicago Hilton to mark the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Orientalism<\/i>. Said appeared on a platform that was packed with his supporters. Critics from the floor were shouted down. I can still see and hear Homi Bhabha<\/a> on the platform contemptuously booming out \u201cWho are you? Who are you?\u201d to one hapless member of the audience who was trying to make a point from the floor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That \u201chapless member\u201d was me. Irwin is accurate, except that there weren\u2019t any other \u201ccritics from the floor\u201d aside from me. Said, knowing I was in the audience, specifically invited me to stand up and challenge him, as though\u00a0he were interested in a debate. That turned out to be a set-up. (Homi Bhabha, Said\u2019s chivalrous defender on that occasion, is now alleged by the keepers of Said\u2019s flame to have betrayed him<\/a> by criticizing the departed Said through\u00a0\u201cZionist argumentation.\u201d Bhabha furthermore stands accused of being \u201cpopular in some leftist Israeli academic circles.\u201d A falling out among post-colonialism\u2019s thieves.)<\/p>\n

The next time I figured in a MESA plenary, I wasn\u2019t even there. It was in San Francisco in 2001, shortly after 9\/11 and the publication of my book<\/a> Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America<\/i>. Franklin Foer went out to cover the conference for The New Republic<\/i>, and in his report<\/a> I read this: \u201cThere was one universally acknowledged villain at the conference\u2014it just wasn\u2019t Osama bin Laden. No, the man everyone loved to hate was Martin Kramer.\u201d When my name was mentioned by someone in the plenary, \u201csome in the audience actually hissed.\u201d I suppose that was better than \u201cWho are you?\u201d<\/p>\n

So now I\u2019m back, not as a participant but as an observer. I\u2019ve registered for the conference as a non-member, and that non-membership is principled. Its specific origin is the failure<\/a> of MESA to overcome its political instincts and confer on Bernard Lewis the title of honorary fellow, reserved for a select few<\/a> who\u2019ve made exceptional contributions to the field. Whatever one thinks of Lewis\u2019s politics, only an ignoramus or hack would deny his massive contribution to the field. Writing of Lewis, one former MESA president has\u00a0testified<\/a> to<\/p>\n

the extraordinary range of his scholarship, his capacity to command the totality of Islamic and Middle Eastern history from Muhammad down to the present day. This is not merely a matter of erudition; rather, it reflects an almost unparalleled ability to fit things together into a detailed and comprehensive synthesis. In this regard, it is hard to imagine that Lewis will have any true successors.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yet not only did MESA deign not to confer the honor upon Lewis, it bestowed it upon Edward Said, who brought Middle Eastern studies to the brink of ruin. Lewis never needed any honors from MESA: it was MESA that needed to honor him, and MESA\u2019s failure to do so is evidence that it isn\u2019t a scholarly association in the pure sense. So why join it?<\/p>\n

That brings me to this year\u2019s conference. MESA meets once every three years in Washington, to demonstrate its relevance to the powers that be. University-based Middle East centers feed at the taxpayers\u2019 trough, and so it\u2019s important to show up every few years at the doorstep of Congress, in an effort to prove that academe is \u201crelevant\u201d to the national interest. Some aspect of the program is pitched just for that purpose. (This year, it\u2019s a panel<\/a> on ISIS.)<\/p>\n

The problem is that the radicals\u2019 hormones are raging in the wake the Israel-Hamas war, and many of the rank-and-file would like to add MESA to the list of associations that have passed resolutions calling for an academic boycott of Israel. This isn\u2019t such a smart thing to propose in Washington, and MESA\u2019s president, Nathan Brown, has already reminded<\/a> the members that MESA is \u201ca non-political association.\u201d But some MESA members think otherwise, and they\u2019re always looking for ways to shove MESA even deeper into politics than it already is<\/a>. In short, the conference is bound to be contentious.<\/p>\n

In my next post, I\u2019ll share my impressions of the triumphal reception accorded\u00a0by MESAns to Steven Salaita, the anti-Israel tweet artist who got canned at the University of Illinois, and who\u2019s become a jobless martyr.<\/p>\n

Go\u00a0here<\/a>\u00a0to discuss this post via Facebook.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martin Kramer attends MESA. Why does he bother? Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1167,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2518,101212,101213],"class_list":["post-5553","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-bernard-lewis","tag-middle-east-studies-association","tag-middle-eastern-studies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1167"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5553\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/sandbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}