Spotlight

Interviews with authors of new books on migration and mobility

Farrah Mina interviews Arang Keshavarzian about the book Making Space for the Gulf Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2024)

About the author

Arang Keshavarzian is an Associate Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University. He is the author of Bazaar and State in Iran: The Politics of the Tehran Marketplace (Cambridge UP, 2007), Making Space for the Gulf: Histories of Regionalism and the Middle East (Stanford UP, 2014) and co-editor, with Ali Mirsepassi, of Global 1979: Geographies and Histories of the Iranian Revolution (Cambridge UP, 2021). His articles on various topics have appeared in several edited volumes as well as Politics & Society; International Journal of Middle East Studies, Geopolitics; Economy & Society; Arab Studies Journal; and International Journal of Urban and Region Research.

About the interviewer

Farrah Mina is a second-year master's student at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies. She is drawn to migration, urbanism, and placemaking in the UAE, with a particular interest in everyday urbanity, informal public spaces, and emergent forms of belonging. She is currently a Jack Shaheen Media Fellow at the Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association. Prior to pursuing a graduate degree, Farrah worked as a journalist, writing youth-centered news for Minnesotans impacted by family policing and the forces, largely race and poverty, that thrust families into traumatic encounters with child protective services.

Farrah Mina: Let's start with the title of the book—Making Space for the Gulf. Why did you choose this title, and how does it reflect your central arguments?

Arang Keshavarzian: The title originally was Making Space Out of the Gulf. This was because the larger project is thinking about how the Persian Gulf, which is a body of water and also a social space, becomes transformed into a region and an abstract space; something that can be identified on a map and treated as a unit. The editors wanted a different title, and they thought Making Space for the Gulf was more idiomatic. They're probably correct about that, but also that made sense to me. There was a logic there because Making Space for the Gulf touches on the question of how the Gulf fits into other political and spatial projects, such as empires, nation-states, the global, and the urban. The central point is to think about space in relation to other processes and places, but also to think about the production of space.

FM: You treat the Persian Gulf as a process rather than a fixed entity, and regionalism as an outcome rather than a given. What motivated you to adopt this perspective, and how does it challenge conventional understandings of the region?

AK: The central conceptual move that I'm making is to think about spaces in general, including the Persian Gulf, as a social process. As I was doing my research, I landed on this notion that we have to think about space and place as a multiplicity—not as a singular object or something that's static. An approach to space that’s more processual allows us to grapple with the reality that places mean different things to different people, depending on where they're located in social hierarchies, geographically, historically, and in relation to political power. In this formulation, the Persian Gulf is not a fixed territory that can be controlled or dominated, belonging to one nation or empire. It is invariably something that's fluid, changing, and shifting. It ultimately emphasizes that places such as the Persian Gulf are never fully enclosed. They always have permeable boundaries.

FM: What were some of the methodological challenges that you faced writing this book, and how did you navigate issues of access, archive and fieldwork?

AK: If one takes a processual approach to space, then the challenge is where does one start? What are the appropriate archives? Where are the physical locations one goes to? If I was adamant on trying to tell a transnational story of the Persian Gulf, I had to grapple with multiple locations, transnationalism, and so on and so forth; or the impossibility of a comprehensive and single history. One of the challenges I had was how to organize the multiple strands of such a story. There was almost too much to handle. There are lots of histories, people, and places that are constitutive of the Persian Gulf that are left out. But I'm hopefully offering a framework for people to think about these broader questions of the making of the Persian Gulf and its transformations over the past 100 years or so. 

My earlier work was very much grounded on field research, ethnography, and interviews. Readers of the book will realize that this book operates at a broader scale. There are moments where I bring in my own personal experience, and there are certain moments that will feel like social history. My sources range from newspaper articles to colonial archives to interviews. But I did have a real methodological challenge in that I had limitations of accessing many sources I planned to examine and to travel to many countries of the Gulf. This was true of Iran where it became more difficult for me to do field research after 2009, but also when my plan of spending a long period of time in the United Arab Emirates and NYU Abu Dhabi was scuttled when I was denied entry. We need to have more frank conversations about the politics of field research in the Gulf region and the limitations it places on the stories we tell.

FM: Your book is structured by geographic scale rather than chronological order. What led you to make this choice, and how does it shape the reader's understanding of the Persian Gulf? 

AK: Rather than organizing the book chronologically, which would result in a more teleological narrative, I encourage readers to ponder multiplicity and simultaneity. At the same moment it's an imperial space as well as a highly particular or local space—a national space as well as integral to economic globalization. Each of the chapters is looking at the process of the making of the Persian Gulf into a region, in relation to other spatial projects across many decades. The book's four main chapters explore the Persian Gulf through imperialism, state formation, global capitalism, and urban space. Even the conclusion is bringing the question of scale down to the human scale, where I'm trying to think about how Gulf regionalism is experienced, not by nation states or empires or capitalism, but by individuals. The result is that historical moments are narrated multiple times along different scales and the chapters circle in on each other.

FM: What surprised you most in the process of researching and writing this book, and were there moments that reshaped your thinking? 

AK: At one point I discuss this moment when the British cement their hold on the Gulf region at the end of the 19th and start of the 20th centuries. Interestingly, British colonial officers talk about British power over the Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf as a Monroe Doctrine for the British Empire. This was surprising to me because here is a case of British imperial thinkers and colonial officers referencing US global power. The Monroe Doctrine famously is the US political doctrine going back to the 1800s and their relationship to Latin America as a large territorial unit, in the same way that the British had come to think of the Gulf and the Northern Indian Ocean. We usually tell the story that it is the US Empire that learns imperialism from the British. But here is a clear instance where the British are actually looking to the US for a model of spatial control. 

A more abstract point that I came to realize is oftentimes when we talk about transnationalism, movements, and connectivity, we resort to very naturalistic language. We talk about ‘flows,’ ‘tsunamis’ and so on and so forth. As I was doing my research, time and again, I realized that people aren't just simply moving willy nilly from one place to another. They're forced to go to certain places and blocked from going to others. So, one of the things that I learned was to think about mobility and immobility together—to think about movement in terms of channeling, rather than flows. Even if people are connected, even if people have been moving from one place to another throughout human history, it doesn't just happen on its own accord and it is deeply political.

FM: Lastly, who are you hoping will read this book, and what kind of impact do you want it to have? 

AK:  I hope it encourages people to think about space and places as processes, but also ultimately to force people to denaturalize geographic categories like space, region, and nation. Geography is not some sort of  background condition, but something that's being shaped and fought over. It is not separate from society, but integral to it. I tried to write the book in a way that's somewhat light on jargon that can be attractive to people who don't know much about the Middle East and the Persian Gulf or are not vested in one or another discipline. I ended up cutting out a lot of more detailed parts to make the book approachable to those who may not be immersed in these histories. Hopefully, it'll be inspiring—or frustrating— to graduate students to explore the region as a key vantage point  for understanding the modern world, the U.S., capitalism, gender relations, and many, many other things. If how we imagine and circulate through the Gulf shapes how we see the world, then it is a powerful lens to contemplate many issues well beyond its shores.

You can purchase the book here.

You can watch a book talk featuring Arang here.