Joseph Andoni Massad (; born 1963) is a Jordanian academic specializing in Middle Eastern studies, who serves as Professor of Modern Arab Politics and Intellectual History in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. His academic work has focused on Palestinian, Jordanian, and Israeli nationalism.
Massad was born in Jordan in 1963 and is of Palestinian Christian descent. He received his Ph.D. in political science from Columbia University in 1998. He is known for his book Desiring Arabs, about representations of sexual desire in the Arab world.
Biography
In 1998, Massad received his doctorate in political science from Columbia University, and in the fall of 1999 he started teaching at the same institution. There, his views on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and surrounding topics caused controversy. In 2009, he was awarded tenure at the university. The award was denounced by LionPAC, a pro-Israel advocacy group at Columbia.
Colonial Effects (2001) Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University Press. The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.
Over the course of a detailed history of the Jordanian state, from its inception in 1921 to 2000, he argues that state institutions are central to the fashioning of national identity. Massad focuses on institutions of law, the military, and education as key components of nationalism, and elaborates on the production not only of national identity but also of national culture including food, clothes, sports, accents, songs, and television serials.
Colonial Effects was critically praised both by several senior academics in Middle East Studies, including Edward Said who described the book as "a work of genuine brilliance," and by scholars of nationalism such as Partha Chatterjee, Amr Sabet, and Stephen Howe, the last of whom called the book "among the most sophisticated and impressive products" of recent studies in the field. The book was extensively reviewed in academic journals and, according to Betty Anderson, one of the book's reviewers, it has become staple reading on syllabi of nationalism and Middle East politics university courses across the United States and Europe.
John Chalcraft of the University of Edinburgh described Massad's analysis of the impact of colonial subjection on modern Jordanian nationalism as "a major contribution to the literature on Jordanian nationalism, anticolonial nationalism, and the wider field of postcolonial studies;" he also criticizes the paucity of information Massad offers on how "the mass of the population [who] barely get a mention in Massad's account," fared in this history: he finds that in Massad's account "there is an impression that one, white, male, colonial subject is privileged with potency, whereas the agency of others is effaced. For the colonizer, one theory of the subject, for the colonized, another."
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question (2006) The Persistence of the Palestinian Question: Essays on Zionism and the Palestinians, Massad's second book, was published in 2006 by Routledge.
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question analyzes Zionism and Palestinian nationalism from a variety of angles, including race, gender, culture, ethnicity, colonialism, antisemitism, and nationalist ideology. Massad's analysis of the discourse on terrorism in the introduction deals with the dynamics of power relations between Zionism and the Palestinians and traces the history of Zionist and Israeli violence which the British called "terrorism" in Palestine before 1948 and after, while his title chapter on the persistence of the Palestinian question argues that the Palestinian and the Jewish questions are one and the same and that "both questions can only be resolved by the negation of anti-Semitism, which still plagues much of Europe and America and which mobilizes Zionism's own hatred of Jewish Jews and of the Palestinians."
The book has received praise from scholars Ilan Pappé and Ella Shohat as well as from Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi. Shohat praised the book as a "timely and engaging volume" that "makes an invaluable contribution to the ongoing debate over Zionism and Palestine." Pappé saw the book as a "courageous intellectual exercise" and as "a thought provoking book that forces us to reverse our conventional images and perceptions about Palestine's history and future."