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The interpretive key to Colonial Effects is located in its first paragraph, where Joseph Massad tells us that writing the book helped him "understand how I became a Palestinian Jordanian " (p. xi). He then shares his hope that Colonial Effects will "explain the process through which the Jordanian people came to see 'ourselves' the way 'we' do" (p. xi). As a Palestinian Jordanian commentary on "the making of national identity in Jordan," Colonial Effects is impressive. As a commentary on the "we" Jordanian identity might stand for, the book is vexed by the gap (rarely acknowledged by Massad) between identity as an artifact of law and identification as a structure of feeling. Massad is alert to the legal apparatus that underlies Jordanian identity; his historical analysis of it is careful and insightful. On matters of Jordanian identification, however, there is much he cannot see. The ideological cohesiveness of Massad's work, its recognizable place within the field of Jordanian identity politics, is both its strength and, rather predictably, its weakness.
Colonial Effects revisits themes familiar to students of Jordanian history. Using a complex array of sources, Massad argues that (1) Jordanian national identity is a product of colonial and postcolonial institutions; (2) its national symbols--ranging from food to dress to dialect--are invented features or strategically manipulated "effects" of these post/colonial institutions; (3) Jordanian nationalism is marked by two competing strains, one Pan-Arab and anticolonial, the other Hashemite, localizing, and reliant on Western patronage; and (4) Jordanian nationalism since 1948 increasingly has been defined in opposition to an internal, Palestinian Other. Massad's analysis conforms nicely to standard, post-Hobsbawmian views of nationalism. His critical apparatus, which...