Book Review

Middle East and Northern Africa

Jordan was created by Britain in 1921, when it helped the Emir Abdullah to impose his family's rule over territories lying to the east of the Jordan River in what had been part of the Ottoman Empire. Called Trans-jordan until the late 1940s, it was a separately administered part of the British Mandate for Palestine.	1
How then did Jordan become Jordanian? To answer this question, Joseph A. Massad has revisited existing Arabic and English-language memoirs, speeches, and histories, which he subjects to close reading. He is as much a cultural critic as he is a historian, and he excavates in the manner of the "new historicists."	2
Massad distinguishes Jordan from some other colonial and postcolonial states in two ways. First, there were no people calling themselves Jordanian (or Trans-jordanian), nor were there any "Jordanian" nationalist stirrings among the inhabitants of the country before 1921. Second, Jordan was created by outsiders, and its national identity was largely influenced by outsiders: the British, Abdullah and the Hashemite family, and Jordan's Palestinian inhabitants. Jordan's economic development has depended heavily on outside funding, first British and then American foreign aid. Other outsiders—Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the Palestine Liberation Organization—tried at different times to turn the country into something that could advance their respective political agendas.	3
Massad argues that two institutions have had a disproportionate influence on the production of a Jordanian national identity: the law and the military. By examining these institutions, he hopes to provide a mode of inquiry that is applicable to other countries. Specifically, he argues, pace Michel Foucault, that institutions of power such as the law and the military not only have repressive and coercive functions but also productive capacities, especially with reference to the formation of national identities.	4
Massad devotes his first two chapters mainly to the influence of nationality law on the development of a Jordanian identity and the concept of Jordanian citizenship. These are crucial but somewhat unsatisfying chapters because they are insufficiently grounded in historical evidence and because Massad's prose style at times obfuscates more than it clarifies. One example will suffice: "Jordanian nationality, the law asserts, can be established by a combination of two processes: interpellation, which acts as a homological process in which the state interpellates its own subjects as juridical nationals; and choice, which acts as a dialogic process in which the state interpellates subjects as nationals or foreigners juridically and in which these subjects have to 'choose' between these two juridical identities—thus granting limited agency to juridical subjects, although both of their choices are imposed by the state that had already erased any outside to the binary" (p. 36).	. . .