MESA Book Awards
Nomi Stone
University of Texas, Dallas
2023 Albert Hourani Book Award Honorable Mention
Nomi Stone
Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire
University of California Press
Nomi Stone’s Pinelandia: An Anthropology and Field Poetics of War and Empire is a poetic ethnography in which Middle East villages appear as figments of the cultural imagination of the U.S. military during the Global War on Terror. Its fieldwork was conducted not in Iraq but, surprisingly, in forests of North Carolina, where the army set up simulacra of Iraq. This was a strange, neo-Orientalist theater, where American soldiers and Iraqi interpreters engaged in consequential pre-deployment exercises that remained, until this publication, virtually unknown. Bold, original, and evocative, Pinelandia makes a tremendous contribution to our understanding of power dynamics behind the othering of Arabs and Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11.