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This paper explores young Jordanian women’s desire to migrate, uncovering often-unacknowledged factors influencing their decision to leave their home country. By delving into their dreams, aspirations, and expectations, this research uncovers why they firmly aspire and creatively plan to migrate, shedding light on the intricate interplay of agency and gender in shaping their migration choices. It theorizes that these women employ a co-optation strategy, whereby they reinterpret and leverage the inner meaning(s) of gendered expectations regarding education, to facilitate their journey abroad and enact more desired life trajectories. This paper argues that young Jordanian women’s desire to migrate stems from shifting sociocultural values and norms, mirroring evolving understandings of femininity, gender roles, and social hierarchies. Within this framework, migration emerges as a consequence of the country’s inability to address its young population’s aspirations for change. By addressing these dynamics, this research contributes to a deeper understanding of the underlying drivers behind the migration aspirations of a significant segment of Jordan’s youth—a pressing issue the country is facing. Ultimately, the insights offer a valuable perspective on migration as a lens through which ongoing sociocultural transformations can be comprehended.

This paper looks at the complex manner in which children were documented in Ottoman Egypt and their access to citizenship later in postcolonial Egypt. It discusses the making of social and political categories, like citizenship and statelessness, and how Greeks moved through those categories. This paper also analyzes how these categories were imposed, first by the Ottoman Empire and then by the Egyptian nation-state. The end of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, and the declaration of the Egyptian Republic in 1953, the Suez Crisis in 1956, the Arab-Israeli Wars in 1967 and 1973, and the new labor laws of the 1950s and 1960s, among other events, impacted Greeks and others who lived in Egypt at that time. The impact among Greeks in Suez Canal cities was particularly evident in the community’s cohesion, as most evacuated the cities in 1967 with almost everyone else following in 1973. These economic and political factors, and the social processes the community underwent, defined Greek children’s relation with the Egyptian postcolonial state.

This paper investigates a communist plan in the 1920s to establish a Middle Eastern center in the port city of Thessaloniki. To explain this counterintuitive choice, the paper situates Thessaloniki within two radical spaces. First, it shows the importance of post-Ottoman radical networks in making Thessaloniki a critical point of liaison in the 1920s. Second, it discusses the radical connections across the Mediterranean and the agency of revolutionary sailors in establishing these linkages.

This paper, by focusing on a secret report delivered by the Ottoman High Commissioner in Egypt—Gazi Ahmed Muhtar Pasha—to the imperial center regarding the Armenian revolutionaries’ movements, aims to examine three important phenomena of the late Ottoman history. The first goal is to reveal the revolutionary mobilities in the late Ottoman Empire by tracking how said revolutionaries took advantage of the borderlands to mobilize themselves. Second, this particular research serves as an indicator of the spatial politics in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire by exposing how the imperial center governed a multi-layered administrative borderland region of Egypt—a semi-autonomous Khedivate. Finally, this paper seeks to confront traditional historiography on the intelligence activities during the reign of Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909). By doing so, this paper demonstrates how the intelligence organization stretched from the administrative center to the frontiers and borderlands of the Ottoman Empire, contrary to the common assumptions in the existing literature.

This paper explores the manner in which Alia Yunis’s novel The Night Counter evokes the figure of Scheherazade from the Thousand and One Nights. First, the paper looks at Yunis’s comedic articulations of cultural mobility in her description of her childhood attachment to Scheherazade in her essay “My Arabian Superheroine.” Next, the paper examines how the novel reconfigures those childhood articulations to present a “reverse 1001 Nights,” transforming Scheherazade from a storyteller to a listener that elicits stories of more than a century of Arab American history. Through these stories, the novel foregrounds questions of migration, cultural exchange, and translation while exposing the performative dimensions of gendered and racialized configurations of cultural identity. In so doing, this paper suggests, Yunis’s novel not only “counters” narratives of distorted views of Arabs but also promotes a type of “coming out” that embraces the plurality of Arab American stories and modes of belonging.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, United States immigration inspectors at the US-Mexico border excluded hundreds of young Syrians, turning many toward unstable lives as unauthorized migrants in North America. Inspectors combined Progressive Era concerns about child labor with orientalist and racist views of migrants from the Ottoman Empire to conclude that unaccompanied young Syrians posed a threat to the American family and workplace and should be sent back across the Atlantic. And while some excluded boys did return to Syria, the majority found ways to enter the United States without authorization. Some sought the help of smugglers and others obtained falsified papers that claimed uncles, brothers, and family friends as their fathers and accompanied them across the border. While these tactics worked, illicit border crossing launched young migrants into an unauthorized life marked by precarity and fear. In fact, oral histories conducted by the author have revealed that young boys who entered the United States without authorization often ended up in unstable professions connected to urban underworlds. Ultimately, this article seeks to demonstrate the ways hardline immigration policies of the early twentieth century targeting young boys set them on paths toward precarity as they navigated lives in the United States.

As part of a larger ethnography of one family’s experience of the Syrian war and displacement, this paper considers the question of food and foodways. Based on extensive interviews and participant observation, this paper chronicles displacement through changing foodways. Following several families, the paper investigates how scarcity and price inflation punctuated the urgency of the conflict for a cluster of Damascus households. It illuminates critiques of how UN rationing and humanitarian food aid in Tripoli, Lebanon, and Amman, Jordan, aided but also betrayed newly disenfranchised populations. Interlocutors discuss how the introduction of almost-familiar new foods and eating styles in the nearby countries of refuge, Egypt and Turkey, exacerbated memories of home. In the desperate gambit for asylum in Europe, the families discovered how food lines and ration handouts in formal and informal camps from Greece to Germany emphasized the dehumanization and dependency of refugees. By the time many of the families reached their new lives in Germany and elsewhere, siege and famine had come to Syria, as food restriction was used as a weapon against remaining Syrian populations. For families settling into semipermanent exile, the ability to recreate Syrian cuisine and to return to comforting rituals of basic hospitality exchanges marked the beginning of postwar and post-refugee lives. In addressing the theme of how habits of cuisine, taste, and hospitality gave way to rations, dependency, charity, and mass feeding, the paper presents displacement, nostalgia, warfare, and humanitarian relief efforts in a new light.

The focus of scholarly studies and literary works on Egyptian Copts as a persecuted or a faith community has diverted attention from seeing them as active agents who challenge hegemonic powers within the complex overlapping of national and religious discourses. As a diasporic Copt, Shady Lewis voices in his 2018 novel Turuq al-Rab (Ways of the Lord) a counter-narrative of resistance, scrutinizing the prevailing conformist culture fraught with control and repression orchestrated primarily by the state and secondarily by the church. This paper examines the ways in which Lewis offers a new paradigm for understanding Coptic identity in light of Egypt’s socio-history that has produced this culture. It argues that the novel’s interlacing of the twofold church-state and Copts-church asymmetries of power informs Coptic contentions of citizenship, belonging, and relation to the church.

This paper explores the activities of the New York-based Palestine Arab Refugee Office (PARO), the first unofficial Palestinian-led organization that defended Palestinian self-determination in the United States following the establishment of Israel. Based mainly on the private papers of PARO public-relations officer Sami Hadawi, the memoirs and writings of PARO president Dr. Izzat Tannous, as well as rare PARO publications (such as its monthly newsletter), it examines how this small, two-person operation attempted to culturally decolonize U.S. state and society, and thus Palestinians in the process.

While coverage of the 2015 refugee crisis highlighted the impact on Europe, countries of the Middle East and North Africa host approximately four times the number of refugees, in addition to millions of migrants. This paper asks: What options do host states in the Middle East and North Africa have for engaging with migrants and refugees residing semipermanently on their territory? It presents a new policy option, “indifference,” that allows us to understand the important transformations taking place in MENA host countries. To examine how indifference might be strategically selected and utilized by host states, the paper draws on data collected over two years in Egypt, Morocco, and Turkey. It finds that these states used a policy of indifference to manage their migrant and refugee influxes throughout the 1990s and 2000s, and also examines the security, diplomatic, and economic factors that led them to begin changing their policies in 2013. Cover image is a beauty salon run by migrants in the Rabat neighborhood of Hay Nahda. Photo by author (2015).

In press coverage of the 1927 earthquake in Palestine, frequent mention is made of the deaths of three women at the Winter Palace Hotel in Jericho. That the three were from British-occupied India apparently rendered them unusual enough to be noted by a journalist, whose observation was reproduced around the world. This article draws on newspapers, official documents and secondary literatures on the hajj, tourism and the British Empire to consider the history of South Asian travellers to Palestine and relationships between colonialism and travel in the interwar period. One of the three women was Lady Abdul Rauf, the wife of a retired High Court judge and veteran Indian Muslim nationalist campaigner, Sir Syed Abdul Rauf. The couple had departed Bombay in April 1927 for the hajj to Mecca and Medina, but extended their trip to include Jericho. This was not unusual; the Indian Hospice in the Old City of Jerusalem attests to a long history of Indian visitors to Palestine. This paper, however, locates the ill-fated presence of Lady Abdul Rauf and her companions in the changing nature of Indian travel in the region, as religious pilgrimage to Jerusalem combined with politics and tourism, and as changing infrastructures of capitalism and colonialism shifted how Indian visitors experienced Palestine.

How does emigration affect the politics of the country of origin? This paper argues that emigration is constitutive of subject-making processes within the sending state. Steering away from instrumentalist approaches that treat it as a prudential act, cross-border mobility is here examined as licensed political participation. By engaging in (or abstaining from) migration, citizens embed themselves deeper into specific social norms and practices as defined, discursively and substantively, by governmental policies. The act of migration, thus, allows citizens to infuse meaning into distinct social orders and engage in subject-making processes. The empirical case of modern Egypt demonstrates how such an approach can shed light upon the ways through which political structures are affected by emigration in non-democracies. In the divergent approaches to migration under President Nasser and, later, under Presidents Sadat and Mubarak, lie two different normative ‘constructions’ of the Egyptian subject: the frugal, self-sufficient Egyptian who rejects emigration under Nasser is contrasted with the self-interested, profit-seeking Egyptian subject-migrant under Sadat and Mubarak. By highlighting this opposition through the framework of cross-border mobility, this paper seeks to shed light into the multiple resonances that migration has as a subject-making process, and enhance our understanding of the politics of emigration under non-democratic regimes.

How can one really get involved in any given society without mastery of its language? This seemingly innocuous question, which refers to modes of political participation, sheds light on the cornerstone of political participation for “Tunisians abroad.” Beyond that, it also highlights their alternative relation to the local Tunisian colloquial/vernacular. While this relationship may at times enhance their status as outsiders, it also enables them to shift the goal posts of national borders. Building on this hypothesis, the paper analyses the uses of language by two groups from the diaspora which have risen to power: the diaspora of exiles and the ‘brain-drain’ diaspora. Regarding the former, exclusive socialization for decades in their country of exile has meant they have adopted new languages and use different variants of the Arabic language, which they learn through encounters with militants and other people, from North Africa to the Middle East. This paper argues that this unprecedented situation renders the old binary opposition between secular Francophones and Islamist Arabic speakers more complex. The brain-drain diaspora represents another facet of the power nexus in Tunisia: many of its elements have since “returned” to take over the current technocratic government, and have also developed a different relationship with language, which has impacted upon both the codes of politics and identity codes in Tunisian society.

In 1989, a replica of the Great Sphinx of Giza was photographed passing in front of the Statue of Liberty. This image recalls neglected imperial histories and challenges global models of center and periphery. A similar encounter occurs at the beginning of Ameen Rihani’s work Arabian Peak and Desert: Travels in Al-Yaman, where the early twentieth century Syrian American scholar writes of a chance meeting with a “man from the Yaman.” Their conversation is brief, yet it colors the travel narrative that follows. In this paper, I read these encounters together to situate moments of “reply” to Orientalist discourses. These encounters simultaneously reproduce and displace Eurocentric histories and epistemologies by creating a space that is both within and outside modern narratives of progress. This paper analyzes the two encounters and proposes montage as a method for reexamining literary and visual texts.

This article explores Antun Saʿadeh’s campaign to establish the Syrian Social Nationalist Party among Syrian and Lebanese migrants in the Americas. Diasporic press sources from Argentina and Brazil indicate that the Syrian Nationalists continued to foreground Saʿadeh as a figure whose authority derived in part from a youthful following. The support of the young distinguished him from other leaders, or zuʿamāʾ, and in particular from the late-Ottoman notables whose command over anti-imperial politics was increasingly contested in the 1930s and 1940s. Syrian Nationalist recruitment in South America, and subsequent polemics with local public figures that it inspired, revealed ambivalences in this narrative of a transformative youth politics. The relationship between young nationalists and the leaders who claimed to galvanize them was both celebrated and called into question. These anxieties coincided with doubts about the contributions of mahjar print culture and associational life to nationalist mass movements. In this way, youth rhetoric reflected a transnational middle-class reckoning with interwar popular politics. In tracing the mobility of a political imaginary that pitted youthful nationalists against incumbent elites, the paper proposes a new reading of the politics of notables framework itself as one among several forms of interwar middle-class worldmaking.

The present paper describes three Syrian midwives and four Syrian doctors who lived in the nineteenth-century Syrian colony of New York City. Midwifery has been entirely overlooked in Middle Eastern migration studies, although, like peddling, it played an important role in the economic independence of Syrian women, offering them the chance to earn their own living and stand somewhat outside the strictures of both American and Syrian societies. Midwifery came under assault from outside the Syrian community in the early years of the twentieth century—when the medical establishment, aided by a virulent press, made midwifery illegal—as well as from inside, where the pressures to assimilate contributed to the demise of the traditional midwife and her replacement by western-trained doctors. All of the Syrian doctors who lived in the colony were trained at Syrian Protestant College (now American University of Beirut), and their western medical knowledge and authority played a role in the movement to marginalize midwives.[i] [i] This paper is the second in a series that foregrounds aspects of the nineteenth-century Syrian colony of New York as portrayed in my book, Strangers in the West: The Syrian Colony of New York City, 1880-1900 (New York: KalimahPress, 2015).

This paper looks at careers, families, and households as a way to explore the relationship between two forms of movement—physical and social. Privileging the account of a family over the more traditional androcentric historical narrative, it utilizes the correspondence of one Zionist-Yishuvi family, the Muchniks, during World War II. The analysis points to the Muchniks’ adoption of a coherent family strategy, one that attempted to harness the extensive wartime profits that flowed to the Zionist Yishuv during this period to attain lasting upward mobility for the family. By adopting a split household pattern, the article argues, the Muchnik family strategy consisted of two interdependent cogwheels of physical movement. In the first, Rosa and the children dissolved all semblance of a nuclear household and instead constantly moved between their extended family’s farmsteads in the Zionist agricultural settlement of Nahalal. In the second, Pinchas was temporarily freed from the obligations of a family-man and joined the ranks of the first generation of region-trotting lower class Yishuvi men as a soldier in the British army. Together, these two cogwheels empowered the family’s climb up the social ladder.

The paper studies one typical interrogation (costituto) from early eighteenth-century Venetian couriers who walked the republic’s overland connection from Cattaro to Istanbul. In considering how time and space are reported in the included primary source, this article looks at how these modes of spatial and temporal representation relate to the structural realities of early modern long-distance traveling, thereby recovering the early modern road with its infrastructure and courier networks as a dynamic locus of contemporary politics.

In this paper, I explore how Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi (2015) and Malaka Ghraib’s I Was Their American Dream (2019) work to forge a new space for the graphic novel in Arab American self-representation in twenty-first-century media, becoming emblematic of what I call ‘visual hakawatis.’ Visual hakawatis, I argue, use individualized acts of storytelling to transform fragments of their histories and memories into hybridizations of art and written word that reflect their increasingly hybridized existences, while interconnecting their personal, cultural, and historical experiences. In these convergences, stories of resistance and refusal emerge, intervening in notions of history- and nation-making, national belonging and national memory, resisting the marginalization or erasure of multiplicities of Arab American histories and identities within and beyond a U.S. landscape. Some key questions informing my analysis include: How do Abdelrazaq’s and Gharib’s graphic novels reconceptualize historical as well as artistic conventions of storytelling in underscoring radical forms of witnessing, memory, and resistance to U.S. hegemonic discourses and understandings of Arab Americans? In what ways does the visual medium of the graphic novel help Abdelrazaq and Gharib forge memories of and bear witness to inherited pasts and cultures, as well as underscore the complexity of Arab American positionalities and multiplicities today?

This paper investigates the forms of representation of Syrian refugees in Zaman newspaper, a Turkish daily that was associated with the Gülen movement, between 2011–2015. The argument focuses on human interest stories in search for alternative forms of representation from the victimization and collectivization that are emphasized in the literature. Based on open coding of 209 news articles that were identified through frame analysis, the analysis shows that the coverage included contradictory strategies of victimization and humanization. The contradictory strategies are understood as a form of inclusive othering that encompass the initial desire to attribute human qualities to the refugees and subsequent attempt to victimize them. As the newspaper was party to a larger political conflict within Turkey, we understand the contradictory strategies and especially the specific shift in representation as part of the process of politicization. The analysis concludes that politicization limits attempts to humanize refugees.

This article analyzes narratives of emigration among Syriac Christians who migrated from Turkey to Vienna, Austria. It sets out from a starting point of exploring the different ways that migration affects family life and reproduction. By using “linked biographies,” the discussion focuses upon intergenerational aspects in order to explore the ways in which history is understood and reproduced by individuals with their own narrative but interconnected with the biographies of family members. Through the analysis of the narrative strategies of three men and their sons, it is shown how the individuals draw on cultural idioms of Syriac family and masculinity when telling their stories and simultaneously negotiating their moral agency. The paper argues that the analysis of biographical material reveals that postmigration intergenerational loyalties are not only about negotiating collective identity but also about pressures for social mobility.

This article explores how migrants experience the process of becoming (and being) citizens by taking the understudied case of Middle Eastern Christians of Iraqi and Egyptian heritage residing in the United Kingdom. It is argued that exclusion in the Middle East reinforces a sense of inclusion in the UK particularly due to the prevalence of the rule of law in the UK. However, by exploring a “clash of values” on the role of religion in society and sexual liberalization issues, it is suggested that Middle Eastern Christians’ support for equality and tolerance is not absolute, especially when they perceive societal norms as conflicting with religious teachings. Finally, the paper shows how the notion of “protective patriotism” is used by some Middle Eastern Christians to express their belonging to their new state by defending perceived societal values.

This article argues that the 1921 collection of diasporic short stories Hikayat al-mahjar, written by ‘Abd al-Masih Haddad, makes a unique and notable contribution to mahjar literature by mobilizing formal literary techniques and innovative thematic content to capture a Syrian immigrant community engaged in a transitional moment in America. This paper situates Haddad (best known as the founder of the biweekly Arabic newspaper al-Saʼih, and a founding member of the literary society al-Rābiṭa al-qalamiyya) among his literary peers and provides an analysis of Hikayat al-mahjar that demonstrates the work’s points of convergence and divergence from the literary norms of the Arab diaspora in North America. Haddad, in highlighting the ambivalence and tension that overwhelmed Syrian immigrant characters navigating the boundaries of new social and cultural realities, broke ranks with his contemporaries in the Arab diaspora, whose output in Arabic was primarily fixated on nostalgic and romantic depictions of the homeland.

Based on a larger ethnographic project that investigates the spatial impact of the kafala (sponsorship) system on the access and mobility of migrant domestic workers (MDWs) in Beirut, Lebanon, this paper focuses on embodiment and the placemaking of Filipina MDWs in the city. From a theoretical lens that is placed at the intersection between the anthropology of space and place and feminist geography, I argue that the ways in which the precarious and marginalized community of Filipinas creatively makes place for themselves in the city despite spatial exclusion, labor restrictions, and employers’ control, ascribe new meanings to these already existing productions of Beiruti space. The argument is delivered through a spatial ethnographic analysis based on two months of participant observation and semi-structured interviews.

This article explores activist Aliya Hassen’s life to identify local, regional, national, and international networks cultivated by early MENA Muslims in the United States. The United States was a hub of mid-twentieth-century transnational Arab and Muslim organizing, where many activists promoted an ecumenical understanding of Islam that tackled pressing American concerns like feminism, anti-imperialism, as well as social and racial justice. Because this organizing engaged both Arab and non-Arab American groups, including the Federation of Islamic Associations, Islamic Center of DC, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the Nation of Islam, Muslim Mosque, Inc., Ahmadiyya missionaries, and the Muslim World League, it challenges the salience of American racial formations and even national frames as meaningful analytical categories. Spanning the historic marginalization of MENA peoples and post-World War II consolidation of Islamophobia in the United States, Hassen's biography demonstrates the ways historical forces surface different ways of "reading" and understanding her life. Image: Aliya Checking a Tire, folder "Group and Miscellaneous Photographs," Box 2, Aliya Hassen Papers, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan

This paper examines how Algerian resistance figure al-Amir ʻAbd al-Qādir (1808–1883) promoted migration by tying it to proper Islamic practice and to Muslim solidarity. The analysis illustrates how al-Amir ʻAbd al-Qādir mapped out his world and understood the fight he was leading beyond anachronistic nationalist narratives. This is achieved by reading his legal ruling alongside primary sources from the same period. The amir is shown to be both a political strategist who used Islamic concepts to mobilize the population in his vicinity and a thinker whose rhetoric gave meaning to migration.

This article explores the practice, widespread among the diasporic Syrians and North Africans of the nineteenth century, of pretending to be Arabs. “Arabs” were astute purveyors of Orientalism, both in entertainment and in trade. Syrian peddlers and merchants played the Orientalist card because they knew it would help sell their goods. In this paper, I concentrate on those Arabs who made a living entertaining Americans in the nineteenth century by dressing up. Entertainment ran the gamut from stage performance like vaudeville and circus acts to high-toned lectures, with the former being dominated by North Africans and the latter by Syrian Christians. Orientalism sold, and every Arab knew it and exploited it.

This paper explores ideologies of difference and mobility constructed in the circulation of Middle Eastern people and texts by framing these migrations through imperial and nationalist narratives produced in the Middle East and Mexico. The aesthetic and civilizational classifications defended by intellectuals of the Mexican Mahjar debating the Mexican intelligentsia in migrant and national press which situate Mashriqi peoples as fearless explorers and rightful ‘conquerors’ of less beautiful, less modern Middle American natives have a genealogy in Ottoman representations of New World populations. Cultivated during the nahda, the Arab modernist ‘awakening,’ these hierarchizing claims were concerned, like other anticolonial nationalisms, with situating Arabs as both heirs to a glorious ancient civilization and cosmopolitan moderns. Nahda narratives, an Arab decolonizing discourse, had emancipatory as well as subordinating effects as they intersected with Criollo nationalism. Mobilizing the universalist hierarchies integral to global modernism, the discursive decolonization of an ‘Arab civilization’ afforded the subalternization of Middle American populations. It enabled Mashriqi and Middle American elites to bisect Middle American nations into ‘primitive’ Indians and civilized Criollos, so that Mahjar notables and Criollo elites could come to understand themselves as partners in a civilizing mission.

This article engages the Agamben-Agier perspective on refugee camps, which has become dominant in the last few years but has received little critical analysis. Both Giorgio Agamben and Michel Agier at times define the refugee camp in relation to broader scenarios. While Agamben thinks of the camp as a way to define the modern nation state and law, Agier often digresses from the camp with the city in mind. While the work of both teaches us a great deal about the nature of the camp, discussing some of their limitations is essential even to fully develop their own potential. This article aims at contrasting key elements of the Agamben-Agier perspective to my own experience in Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. Three main questions underpin this paper: Is a refugee camp indeed a space of exception? Should we understand the refugee camps in their symbolic and practical continuity or discontinuity to the urban space? Should we consider the camp as having the same properties of the “city” in Agier’s sense?

The revolutionary process in Egypt since 2011 has not only mobilized masses in Egypt, but has also led to a massive politicization and polarization of Egyptian communities abroad. Women from different generations became active in the protests claiming their agency to participate in changing their country. Cyberactivism became a particularly important vehicle for women to participate politically in the revolutionary process. This paper looks at transnational political networks in Paris working to influence politics in Egypt in the (post)-revolutionary phase between 2011 and 2013 with a special focus on women. An analysis of thirty informative-narrative interviews and several popular Facebook pages of diaspora networks reveals how women participated alongside men in transnational mobilizations in Paris, and how they experienced and lived these moments as they took part in their struggle. Several factors shape the political participation of women in this diasporic context, the gendered character of Egyptian migration to France itself, an inner fragmentation and politicization among women and finally, women’s broader understanding of politics blurring the traditional boundary of public and private. Contrary to assimilation theory, most participating women are not marginalized or poorly educated immigrants, but are on the contrary well educated and socially well connected.

For Palestinians in diaspora, memory establishes and validates national consciousness and embodies the ongoing struggles for Palestinian legitimacy on a global scale. Within this community, cuisine and the methods of its production are an essential medium for the retention of cultural knowledge. This paper examines the role of food in the experience of Palestinian collective memory in the Chilean diaspora through sensory ethnography of restaurants and home cooking, in addition to interviews with Palestinian chefs, storeowners, and local residents living in the Chilean towns of La Calera and Quillota. Based on this research, I suggest that the continued reproduction of Palestinian cuisine in Chile simultaneously constitutes an engagement with the local context and a form of diasporic sumud (steadfastness)—a long-term and long-distance connection to Palestine and a quotidian resistance to symbolic erasure. Memory as resistance occurs in the diaspora both through the practice of diasporization itself and the reproduction of Palestinian food culture in the private and public sphere, the intergenerational exchange of traditions and memory, and the voicing of the Palestinian cause within the Chilean context.

Prompted by the publishing phenomenon of Yotam Ottolenghi and Sami Tamimi’s Jerusalem cookbook, this paper considers the discourse(s) of place elaborated by an emergent network of Middle Eastern chefs-in-diaspora. Focusing on Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s Jerusalem and Ottolenghi cookbooks, I argue that cookbooks can be productively analyzed as literary objects with an actor-network methodology. The particular story presented by Ottolenghi and Tamimi’s work is one in which distinctions are repeatedly raised and then dismissed in order to find common ground between Israel and Palestine. Ottolenghi may be an Israeli Jew and Tamimi a Palestinian Muslim, but both men are London expatriates and restaurateurs. The literary dimensions of their cookbooks attempt to harmonize personal narratives with the commercial forces at play in cookbook publishing: peace sells better than conflict, and diasporic nostalgia never goes out of style.

The history of undocumented movement into mandate Palestine by non-Zionist displaced migrants and refugees is one which naturally highlights the territorialization of Palestine’s geopolitical space. From 1920, Great Britain, as the mandatory power in Palestine, bolstered its control over the territory’s physical space through its classification and categorization of refugees and displaced migrants, and the regulation of their movement. Yet, the reactions to these processes by migrants and refugees, highlighted by numerous examples from the archival record, are not entirely ones of resistance. Despite the changing definitions and benefits of refugee and migrant status from the late Ottoman through the interwar period, often-undocumented arrivals to Palestine actively engaged with the mandate’s new immigration and mobility-control regimes and documentary-identity regulations. The active engagement of refugees and displaced migrants included circumventing and subverting these new regimes in a number of pragmatic and inventive ways. As the paper demonstrates, this very engagement serves to highlight the limitations of the mandate administration’s policies on immigration and mobility and of its migrant classification system.

This study of the Lebanese in Australia from the 1880s to 1947 was an exercise in historical retrieval. Because the lives of the early immigrants were bound by racially based colonial and then state and federal legislation, archival records are a rich source of information about Lebanese and their status as a non-European, non-white, immigrant group in the context of a white Australia. Due to a deliberate silence about the past, most descendants did not know they were classified as Asian and were unaware of the specific difficulties their parents and grandparents faced as a consequence. When memories collected in oral history interviews and information from archival sources are woven together, it is possible to tell a more complete story. Sometimes, commonly held beliefs about the migration story are challenged; in other cases, the experiences of individuals make more sense when placed in a wider context. Cover image: NAA BP25/1, LEBANESE SALIBA, Saliba, Khouri Susanne - Alien Registration Papers, Queensland. P. 10 of 11.

Unlike the scholarly interest in Arab-American fiction, Arab-Australian literature has not received as much attention from literary critics, Australian-based or otherwise. Increased interest in Arab-American literature has been explained and often contextualized through the United States’ long-standing interference in the Arab world, as well as the tense relations between Arabs and Americans within the US. But these issues are not unique to America—like the US, Australia has not shied away from intervening in the region and also has its own troubled relations with Arab immigrant communities. And yet, despite these similar circumstances, no study of how Arab­Australian literature might apprehend or dramatize these particular relations has been undertaken. This paper provides some insights into the albeit nascent but growing field of Arab-Australian fiction. It explores how and in what ways Arab-Australian literature can be categorized as a form of Australian writing, and be seen as part of a transnational network of Arab diaspora fiction. Cover image: Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies

I explore in this paper how Middle Eastern diaspora’s art that I call “selfie art” resists against surveillance techniques and technologies in everyday life beyond territorial borders such as public stigma and stereotyping in the host countries in North America. My analysis is composed of three stages: (1) The study of self-surveillance as a method of sousveillance and how self-exposure becomes an object of art; (2) the relation between self-design and politico-ethical allegiance in the visual abundant society through the case of the imagery of Middle Eastern diaspora; (3) ethnographic observations in diasporic art events as well as in-depth interviews with artists and content analysis of various online and offline artworks. I argue that the sousveillance strategies of diasporic art coincide with the resisting communities that negotiate with technologies of surveillance to lead a state of equiveillance in the visual public sphere.

Arab Protestants are an understudied group in Canada, and this paper seeks to address that gap by describing the religious transnationalism of Arab Protestants in The Presbyterian Church in Canada. The six Arabic-speaking congregations explored have sought to negotiate space for an Arab Protestant identity within a Euro-Canadian denomination. They have done this not by being an enclave separate within the denomination but through engagement with the denomination. In the negotiation process, the Arabic-speaking congregations have been shaped by the Canadian church and the Canadian church has been shaped by the presence of an Arab identity in its midst.

A decade after the 2001 royal amnesty, when the first two waves of leftist then Islamist exiles came back to Bahrain, the 2011 uprising marked a “third” phase in the history of Bahraini outmigration and exile politics. The brutal repression of the protest movement led to a new wave of political exile which affected a wider range of socio-economic profiles; moreover, 2011 saw the emergence of a new generation of Bahraini activists, born and raised in Western countries. This paper focuses on the Bahraini exiled community and its forms of distance activism. Defining it first as mainly political, it seeks to show how legacies of Bahrain exile have contributed to provide international resources to continue the political fight at times of domestic closure. Second, it demonstrates how the regime, following the 2011 crisis, tried to delegitimize the diasporic opposition by appropriating its human rights discourse and excluding it from the nation.

This paper explores political struggles that took place in the Southend of Dearborn in the 1970s that coincided with the rise of Arab nationalist and Islamic movements in Michigan and linked these interests to those of Arab-American activists involved in the civil rights movement, labor organizing, and other campaigns for social and economic justice. These struggles launched the careers of activists who cooperated in the 1970s and 1980s to establish several of the nation’s leading Arab- and Muslim-American service, religious, and community-based institutions and played a significant role in transforming Dearborn into the well-known Arab American hub of today. In the Southend, newer and older Arab constituencies joined forces to build an unprecedented institutional infrastructure, both the left-liberal, secular, politically empowered Arab-American establishment of Dearborn and it’s equally engaged, but pious and socially conservative Muslim-American establishment. Thus the Southend struggles provide key insights into the social challenges that came to define Arab-American (and Muslim-American) identities in the half century that followed. In this essay I bring these histories together and explain why more work needs to be done before we can make sense of the political challenges Arabs and Muslims—as distinctive and overlapping communities—have faced in the US.