Chehabi Pens Journal Paper on “Asia’s Lost West”
Houchang E. Chehabi, Professor of International Relations and History at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, published an article on recovering Asia’s lost west in the journal Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies.
Volume 31, Issue 2 of the journal was released in January 2016, and includes the article “Recovering Asia’s Lost West: Iran’s Asian Connections in the Realm of Sports.”
From the text of the article:
One could therefore argue that while it is true that “the Middle East” is a Eurocentric concept, so is “Asia,” which, after all, was defined by the ancient Greeks and not by the people of Asia themselves. So why insist that “West Asia” is preferable to the “Middle East”?
The reason is the term “Middle East” erases historical, linguistic and cultural continuities in the contact between the peoples of West Asia and the rest of the continent. In this article I illustrate these connections and continuities by drawing attention to athletic practices that can be found in the various regions of Asia — from the East coast of the Mediterranean to the West coast of the Pacific Ocean.
You can read more from the Japan Association for Middle East Studies here.
Houchang Chehabi has taught at Harvard and has been a visiting professor at the University of St. Andrews, UCLA, and the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa. He has published two books, Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism: The Liberation Movement of Iran under the Shah and Khomeini (1990) and Distant Relations: Iran and Lebanon in the Last 500 Years (2006). Chehabi has written numerous articles, book reviews, and translations. You can read more about him here.