Joseph Massad

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."

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."

"Massad's brilliant and scholarly work is profoundly illuminating not only for the history of Palestine and the discourses surrounding it, but for the history of Europe and the United States and, finally, as an account that raises compelling theoretical questions."

In his review in Nations and Nationalism, Israeli scholar Ephraim Nimni wrote:

"like his intellectual mentor, Massad reminds us of a long and honourable tradition of Jewish Intellectuals who could only envisage the solution to the Jewish Question through universal emancipation. It seems that Massad, and the late Edward Said, are existential Diaspora Jews of the old kind ... The book is also fastidiously referenced, showing the erudition of the author and his command of the voluminous Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as the classics of Jewish history."

Joseph Andoni Massad (جوزيف مسعد; 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.

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.

The book is based on Massad's PhD dissertation, which won the Middle East Studies Association Malcolm Kerr Dissertation Award in 1998.

Massad's first book, Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, was published in 2001 by Columbia University Press.

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 third book, Desiring Arabs, was published in 2007 by the University of Chicago Press.

Desiring Arabs won Columbia University's 2008 Lionel Trilling Book Award, awarded by a jury of students on the grounds that it "offers a probing study of representations of Arab sexuality" and is "an important and eloquent work of scholarship that the committee feels will have a lasting impact on the field."

Desiring Arabs is an intellectual history of the Arab world and its Western representations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The book makes contributions to a number of academic and theoretical fields.

It extends Said's study of Orientalism by analyzing the latter's impact on Arab intellectual production; it links Orientalism to definitions and representations of sex and desire and in doing so provides a colonial archive to the sexual question that has hitherto been missing; it approaches the literary as the limits of imagining the future; and puts forth the question of translation as a central problem in Euro-American studies of the other.

Massad argues that "Western male white-dominated" gay activists, under the umbrella of what he terms the "Gay International," have engaged in a "missionary" effort to impose the binary categories of heterosexual/homosexual into cultures where no such subjectivities exist, and that these activists in fact ultimately replicate in these cultures the very structures they challenge in their own home countries.

Massad writes that

"The categories gay and lesbian are not universal at all and can only be universalized by the epistemic, ethical, and political violence unleashed on the rest of the world by the very international human rights advocates whose aim is to defend the very people their intervention is creating."

In her review of Desiring Arabs in the Arab Studies Journal, feminist scholar Marnia Lazreg, a professor of sociology at CUNY, wrote, "This truly monumental book is a corrective to Michel Foucault's History of Sexuality that inexplicably omitted the role played by the cultural effects of colonial systems on conceptions and constructions of sexuality ... [Desiring Arabs] is an epoch-making book".

Khaled El-Rouayheb of Harvard University called the book, "A pioneering work on a very timely yet frustratingly neglected topic. ... I know of no other study that can even begin to compare with the detail and scope of [this] work."

Samia Mehrez, a professor of Arabic Literature at the American University in Cairo writes in the Journal of Gender Studies:

"Desiring Arabs by Joseph Massad is an impressive project that ventures into uncharted territory and can be read as a complement to both Edward Said's Orientalism and Michel Foucault's work on sexuality. Like all of Massad's work, Desiring Arabs investigates the discursive and institutional continuum through which culture is 'invented' under both colonial rule through colonial practices that sought to reify racial and religious differences as well as through the cultural politics of the post-colonial nation state and its efforts to consolidate the nation, national identity, and national belonging."

Ferial Ghazoul in the Journal of Arabic Literature, writes:

"Massad's interdisciplinary approach, dense prose, impeccable research, and above all the thought-provoking issues he raises make his book a scholarly landmark ... As a student of the late Edward W. Said and as Desiring Arabs was dedicated to Said ..., Massad has certainly learned the lessons of Said, his critical innovation, his scholarly meticulousness, and his virtuoso style."

While there has been a clear consensus on the book's significant scholarly contributions, some of the book's theses have been criticized by Rayyan Al-Shawaf, a freelance writer and reviewer living in Beirut, who concedes that Massad makes a few good points, but observes that "Massad's relativism – stemming from his accurate observation that 'homosexuality' is alien to Arab same-gender sexual traditions – is so extreme that he refuses to support a call for universal freedom of sexual identity."

In 2009, he was awarded tenure at the university.

The award was denounced by LionPAC, a pro-Israel advocacy group at Columbia.