A Cornerstone for Building a New World

The Soviet Union and the Futurity of Leftist Arab Intellectuals, 1920–1948

Bibliographic Data

ID12955464
AuthorsSana Tannoury-Karam (0000-0002-9262-523X, Lebanese American University, corresponding author)
Year2024
Volume17
Issue1
Pages9-28
Publication date2024-04-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueMiddle East Journal of Culture and Communication (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1873-9857 • E-ISSN: 1873-9865
PublisherBrill (PUBLISHER • NL)
DOI10.1163/18739865-01701001
OpenAlexW4407693965
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited11

For a generation of Arab leftist intellectuals active during the interwar years, particularly during World War Two, the Soviet Union represented a ‘miraculous’ case of modernization, a success story of a country that managed to rapidly modernize and even exceed the levels of progress and sophistication of Western nations. Its trajectory since 1917 represented a model for progress achieved through socialism and internationalism. Standing firmly against Western colonialism and steadily against the Nazi war machine, the Soviet Union became the model for a modern Arab future. The Soviet Union as ‘future’ was not only a temporal construct as much as it was a spatial framework through which Arab intellectuals shifted modernization discourses of the Nahda from West-East dimensions to East-East imaginaries

Archaeology · Cornerstone · Data science · Colonial History and Postcolonial Studies · Computer Science · History · Islamic Studies and History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies

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