faculty

Khaldoun Samman, Associate Professor
BA George Washington University 1988, MA SUNY Binghamton 1996, PhD SUNY Binghamton 2001

Khaldoun Samman took his undergraduate studies at George Washington University in Washington D.C. and received his PhD in Sociology from the State University of New York at Binghamton. He joined the Macalester sociology department in 2002. Professor Samman teaches the department’s Social Theory course, Islam and the West, Secularism and Its Discontents, as well as a range of classes on social problems and social inequalities. Professor Samman’s latest publication, Cities of God and Nationalism: Mecca, Jerusalem, and Rome as Contested World Cities (2007), tackles the controversial thesis that modernity, far from bringing in an age of tolerance, creates the social bases of exclusion. The central thesis of the book is that our real problem is the rigid conceptions of national spaces and peoples that have recently been forced upon these sacred spaces. The book uses three major sacred cities to explore how modernity, through the apparatus of nationalism and the nation-state, redefined our constructs of self and other in fundamental ways, having major implications for the way Rome, Mecca, and Jerusalem are conceived by the inhabitants of the world who identify with them. Professor Samman’s current work will explore the nationalist discourses of Kemalists, Zionists, Arab nationalists and contemporary Islamists. Samman argues that all of these movements are a response to the incorporation of the region into the matrix of modernity, with Zionism and Kemalism, in their secular orientation, ascribing to the dictates of modernizing and Occidentalizing nationalist identities while the latter, especially the Islamist, prefer an alternative orientation, what Samman identifies as an Orientalizing modernity. This latter project is especially important because it symbolizes the slow evaporation and eventual deligitimization of the racialized discourses of the Enlightenment and the modernist/nationalist projects which, through their developmentalist and modernizing projects, reproduced the racial schemes of their colonial masters. Recently, professor Samman collaborated with a number of his students and published together their sociologically informed biographries in the journal Human Architecture: The Journal of the Sociology of Self Knowledge (2005, Volume 3). He hopes to do something similar for his Spring 2007 course, Islam and the West.