Changing Spatial Discourses of National Identity in Jordan Laura
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Changing Spatial Discourses of National Identity in Jordan Laura Wing Mei Yan Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Prerequisite for Honors in History April 2014 © 2014 Laura W. M. Yan Contents Acknowledgements 2 Introduction 5 Chapter I: Establishing the State of Transjordan, 1850 to 1940 13 Chapter II: Discourses of Pan-Jordanianism: The Annexation of the 55 West Bank, 1948-1967 Chapter III: Discourses of a Tribalized National identity, 1967 to 1990 95 Chapter IV: Museums, Monuments, and Downtown Amman: Spatial 132 Discourses of National Identity Conclusion 176 Bibliography 181 1 Acknowledgements The idea for this project emerged from readings of articles by Dr. Elena Corbett, who graciously read my initial proposal and suggested several invaluable sources. I must also thank the staff at the American Center for Oriental Research (ACOR) in Amman, Jordan for their help and their wonderful tea. Preston Quinn, one of my golden friends from my study abroad program in Jordan, also allowed me to use some of his striking photographs of the Martyrs’ Memorial. The staff at the British Library and the National Archives at Kew Garden were extremely helpful in guiding my first experience conducting archival research. I could not have completed this project without the resources of the Wellesley College Library. The Wellesley College History Department has also been my home base for the past year and through the department’s Schwarz scholarship, I was able to travel to London. I would like to thank Professor Brenna Greer and the other honors students for their generous feedback and support. I am also immensely grateful to Professors Simon Grote, Louise Marlow, and Y. Tak Matsusaka for giving their time to serve on my honors committee. For their unconditional love and support, I must thank my family, friends, and loved ones. Finally, I cannot thank my advisor Professor Lidwien Kapteijns enough. Your class about discourse is the foundation of this thesis. I am so grateful to you for being both my toughest critic and most enthusiastic cheerleader. You truly helped me fall in love with history and I would not be the student I am today without your guidance. 2 (Map of Jordan. Author: cacahuate, amended by Globe-trotter. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Accessed April 15, 2014) 3 Acronyms COR British Colonial Office Record FOR British Foreign Office Record IOR British India Office Record JNM Jordanian National Movement PAM Palestine Archeological Museum 4 Introduction The idea for a project about changing spatial discourses of national identity in Jordan emerged during my study abroad experience in Jordan. One of the main themes of a course titled ‘Jordan: A Case Study in Diplomacy and Development’ was narratives and counter-narratives of Jordanian history. As part of the course, I visited various spaces such as the Martyrs’ Memorial and some museums, participated in dialogues with government officials about the potential political and economic trajectories of Jordan, and read some secondary sources about Jordanian history. As I learned more about the narratives and counter-narratives of Jordanian history, I realized that another way to frame historical narratives was with the term ‘discourse’, which, in Foucauldian terms, is not just reflective but also prescriptive, articulating what reality should be according to one – perhaps hegemonic – point of view. From 1921 to the present, the Hashemite monarchy has engaged in and created discourses of Jordanian national identity that reflect how the Hashemite monarchy envisioned and symbolized Jordanian national identity. Charting discourses of Jordanian national identity showed that the Hashemite monarchy’s discourses privileged certain groups of Jordanians at different moments and according to different political contexts. At certain moments, the communities that were excluded or felt marginalized by official discourses of national identity articulated their own discourses of national identity, which were often premised on the exclusion of other communities. For example, as analyzed in the third chapter, certain communities that identified as tribes portrayed Palestinians as foreign or even erased their own Palestinian roots from their oral and written histories. This was done so that such tribes could engage 5 in a discourse of autochthony and think of themselves as ‘true Jordanians’.1 The relationship between official and community discourses was symbiotic and mutually constitutive. Communities’ claims of belonging to Jordan were both a reaction to Hashemite discourses of national identity and sources of new discourses of national identity that the monarchy could appropriate for its own purposes. My initial interest in the project was in the relationship between discourses of Jordanian national identity and public spaces in Amman. Dr. Elena Corbett co-taught the course called ‘Jordan: A Case Study in Diplomacy and Development’ of my study abroad program. Her article about the construction of a Hashemite-dominated narrative of Jordanian history expressed in the King Hussein Park in the capital city of Amman sparked my interest in expressions of discourses of Jordanian national identity in public spaces in Amman. During my time in Jordan, I visited a number of public spaces in Amman, including the Martyrs’ Memorial, the King Hussein Park, the Jordan Museum, and downtown Amman, which are all spaces analyzed in the fourth chapter. Corbett’s article is an essential secondary source that illuminates concepts and contexts for the fourth chapter and I also used personal photographs of the spaces to illustrate my argument. But in order for the reader to fully understand the narratives expressed in public spaces and their significance, I needed to first show how the Jordanian government’s discourses of national identity changed over time and the specific contexts in which they emerged. Thus, this thesis includes three chapters devoted to the political history of Jordan from 1921 to the present with an emphasis on discourses of national identity and sources of legitimacy for the Hashemite monarchy. The fourth and final 1 Autochthony is a term that is used throughout the thesis to convey the notion of being indigenous or native. 6 chapter about public spaces in Amman illustrates how the Hashemite monarchy drew upon all the previously discussed sources of legitimacy to produce narratives of Jordanian history and discourses of Jordanian national identity that supported and still support Hashemite rule. This thesis is located at the intersection of the fields of political and urban history and contributes to discussions about discourse, national identity, and modernity. Much of the political history of Jordan presented in this thesis is based on well-known secondary sources in the field of Jordanian history, including Frontiers of the State in the Late Ottoman Empire by Eugene Rogan, King Abdullah, Britain and the making of Jordan by Mary Wilson, The Making of Jordan by Yoav Alon, Jordan, an invented nation? by Schirin Fathi, and East Bank/West Bank by Arthur Day. These sources provide essential information about political contexts ranging from the late Ottoman period to the 1990s. I have also drawn upon British Colonial Office and Foreign Office reports at the British Library and the British National Archives. These primary sources provide insight into the relationship between the British government and King Abdullah and various political conflicts during the mandate period, especially during the early mandate period in the 1920s. The records also show how the British government framed the relationship between Abdullah and his subjects. The secondary sources that were especially helpful in understanding moments of political resistance and communities’ articulation of other discourses of national identity were Colonial Effects by Joseph Massad and Nationalist Voices in Jordan by Betty Anderson. These works analyze changing relations between the monarchy, political opposition groups, Palestinian communities, and East Bank political elites, focusing on the period from the establishment of the mandate in 1921 to 7 Black September in 1970. Massad’s work is especially significant for its analysis of the exclusion of Palestinians in Hashemite constructions of Jordanian national identity. In order to show how different discourses of national identity were expressed, I used both primary and secondary sources. Memoirs including the volume published by King Abdullah and The Story of the Arab Legion by John Glubb were valuable sources for the discussion of colonial and Hashemite discourses of national identity during the early mandate period. These memoirs highlighted both Abdullah’s and Glubb’s emphasis on loyalty to the Hashemites as an essential component of their idea of patriotism. In his study titled Nationalism and Genealogical Imagination, Andrew Shryock recorded oral histories from various communities identified as ‘tribes’ and also examined the phenomenon of written tribal histories. The oral histories were essential to analyzing tribal discourses of Jordanian national identity in the third chapter. Linda Layne’s Home and Homeland was an important source for charting the Hashemite monarchy’s move from a discourse of a pan-Jordanian national identity, which aimed to include both Palestinians and Jordanians, to a discourse of a tribalized national identity, which privileges members of tribes as autochthonous and thus bearers of true Jordanianness. As for urban history, this thesis does not delve into the urban