Department of

Anthropology

Department of Anthropology
Old Main 330, University of Arkansas
Fayetteville, AR 72701
Phone: (479) 575-2508; Fax: (479) 575-6595
E-mail: chitt@uark.edu
Maintained by Web Guy

 

 

Dr. Swedenburg received his Ph.D. in cultural anthropology from the University of Texas in 1988. His dissertation, a study of popular memories of the 1936-39 revolt in Palestine, involved interviewing elderly peasants living in Palestinian villages in the Galilee and the West Bank. He taught at the University of Washington -Seattle between 1988 and 1991, and at the American University in Cairo from 1992 to 1996. He joined the University of Arkansas in 1996.

Dr. Swedenburg's recent research focuses on popular music. He is currently working on a book manuscript, tentatively titled Sounds from the Interzone, that deals with "border" musics of the Middle East as well as Middle Eastern-inflected musics of the West. He has done research and presented papers on Franco-Algerian rai music, "Islamic" African-American rap, and Mizrahi dance music in Israel. His most recent fieldwork has been on the popular music of Nubians in Egypt.

Dr. Swedenburg teaches courses on the Middle East, race and ethnicity, gender, and public culture. He is on the editorial committee of Middle East Report, and is actively involved with the King Fahd Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences.

Selected Publications

"Saida Sultan/Danna International: Transgender Pop and the Polysemiotics of Sex, Nation, and Ethnicity on the Israeli-Egyptian Border." THE MUSICAL QUARTERLY 81(1):81-108.

Edited (with Smadar Lavie). DISPLACEMENT, DIASPORA, AND GEOGRAPHIES OF IDENTITY. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996.

(with Smadar Lavie). "Between and Among the Boundaries of Culture: Bridging Text and Lived Experience in the Third Timespace." CULTURAL STUDIES 10(1): 154-179, 1996.

MEMORIES OF REVOLT: THE 1936-39 REBELLION AND THE PALESTINIAN NATIONAL PAST. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995.

"Prisoners of Love: With Genet in the Palestinian Field." In Carolyn Nordstrom and Antonius Robben, eds., FIELDWORK UNDER FIRE: CONTEMPORARY STUDIES OF VIOLENCE AND CULTURE, pp. 24-40. Berkeley: University of California Press. 1995.

(with Joan Gross and David McMurray) "Arab Noise and Ramadan Nights: Rai, Rap and Franco-Maghrebi Identity." DIASPORA 3(1): 3- 39, 1994.

"Homies in the 'Hood: Rap's Commodification of Insubordination." NEW FORMATIONS 18: 53-66, 1992.

"Seeing Double: Palestinian-American Histories of the Kufiya." MICHIGAN QUARTERLY REVIEW 31(4): 557-577, 1992.

"Popular Memory and the Palestinian National Past." In Jay O'Brien and William Roseberry, eds., GOLDEN AGES, DARK AGES: IMAGINING THE PAST IN HISTORY AND ANTHROPOLOGY, pp. 152-79. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

(with David McMurray) "Rai Tide Rising." MIDDLE EAST REPORT 21(2): 39-42, 1991.

"The Palestinian Peasant as National Signifier." ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY 63(1): 18-30, 1990.
"Occupational Hazards: Palestine Ethnography." CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 4(3): 265-72, 1989. Reprinted in George Marcus, ed., REREADING CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Durham: Duke University Press, 1992.

"The Role of the Palestinian Peasantry in the Great Revolt (1936-39)." In Edmund Burke III and Ira Lapidus, eds., ISLAM, POLITICS, AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS, pp. 169-203. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Reprinted in Albert Hourani et al, eds., THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST: A READER, London: I.B. Tauris and Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.