Tribal modern: branding new nations in the Arab Gulf

Abstract

TRIBAL MODERN: BRANDING NEW NATIONS IN THE ARAB GULF miria m cooke Berkeley: Universit y of California Press, 2014 (214 pages, notes, references, index) $25.65 (paper)Tribal Modern: Branding New Nations in Arab Gulf is latest of a growing body of work seeking to explain rapid transformations of Arab Gulf states and their emergence as regional and global actors over past decade. This scholarship has been dominated by historical studies drawing on British archives, state-centric studies of political legitimation, rentierstate theory, and more recent work in urban studies and spatial theory. In a departure from these trends, miriam cooke locates Gulf Arab modernity not in material transformation but in cultural production. As a study of contemporary Gulf Arab art, literature, and poetry, Tribal Modern is a welcome addition to an expanding field. It also stands out as a work focused on Qatar, least studied of Gulf states, where cooke did much of fieldwork on which book is based.At its outset, Tribal Modern argues against equation of with primitive and non-Western, exemplified by debate over a 1980s MoMA exhibit titled Primitivism in Modern Art, which juxtaposed Western modernist and non-Western works of art. Even critics of exhibition's binary premise, she notes, reproduced binaries of West/ other and tribal/modern. More commonly, cooke criticizes tendency of Gulf observers and expatriates to assume that Gulf Arabs must constantly negotiate contradictory demands of tradition and modernity. Instead, she argues, and are mutually constitutive and lived simultaneously. Here cooke employs Qur'anic term barzakh, variously described as signifying undiluted convergence (10), the simultaneous process of mixing and separation, (13), and a liminal metaphysical space between life and hereafter and also physical space between sweet and salt water (71). This last definition, drawn from Qur'an, probably describes Gulf near Bahrain, where pearl divers found freshwater springs on Gulf floor, and salt and fresh waters mingled. Cooke's interpretation of barzakh is less literal; she wants reader to think of Gulf Arab societies as inhabiting a barzakh space where and converge but remain undiluted. This barzakh forms core of national brands that Gulf states employ to legitimize themselves in eyes of foreigners and citizens alike. In this way, barzakh and tribal modern are one way to get past tradition/modernity binary that still characterize much of scholarly and popular debate on Gulf societies.Cooke begins book with a description of Gulf's cosmopolitan pre-oil past, in which it was a critical node in Western Indian Ocean commercial networks and a borderless, stateless center of world's pearling industry. The marginalizing of this polyglot world in contemporary Gulf memory is necessary precondition for emergence of cooke's tribal modern. The decline of pearling, rise of oil, and subsequent spectacular transformations of Gulf cities led to a massive influx of foreign workers and new forms of cultural and economic exclusion. The emergence of states meant that citizens began to identify themselves along national lines, in process downplaying or denying cosmopolitan heritage of recent past. New discourses of local rootedness and cultural authenticity-exemplified, in cooke's analysis, by Abdelrahman Munif's Cities of Salt, which was long banned in Gulf countries-justify citizens' claims to oil-generated wealth distributed by state.Chapters two through four analyze nexus between tribe and nation as categories of belonging among Gulf Arabs, and how they have become racialized through genetic research on origins. The tribe and nation exist in tension with each other, as cooke explores through her study of marriage practices. …