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Category: EUME

Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe (EUME) is a multi-disciplinary research program at the Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien. The guiding idea of EUME is to explore the historical, political, religious, social and cultural interconnections and demarcations that link and divide Europe and the Middle East. In contrast to thinking in terms of opposites and dichotomies, the diverse processes of reception and translation, common historical legacies, and the mobility of persons, ideas, and societies are to be brought into focus.

Editors: Georges Khalil, Claudia Pfitzner und Rashof Salih

New Approaches to MENA Prison Literatures After 2011

By Anne-Marie McManus. In the past fifteen years, the mass relocation of prison survivors, families of the disappeared, activists, and cultural actors from MENA (the Middle East and North Africa) countries to Europe and North America has placed carceral experience at the heart of contemporary debates and cultural work. The hubs of the new MENA diasporas are in western Europe, but the numerous MENA writers, activists, artists, and former prisoners who are producing work on prison today are to be found globally, from the Gulf and Turkey to North America. This emerging body of work and activism on prison in the MENA is inextricably tied to ongoing struggles for justice for the detained, the tortured, and the disappeared.

Ghost Writers of Upper Egypt: A Paradigm Shift in Archaeological Knowledge Production

By Wendy Doyon. Within the global archive of archaeology created by the past two centuries of excavation in the Middle East and North Africa, a significant portion of archival documents, notes, and photos form a shadow archive of Middle Eastern history. It documents the knowledge transfer, techniques, craftsmanship, apprenticeship, material studies, and linguistic community of Arabic-speaking co-producers of archaeological knowledge. Rayyis Sayyid Ahmad Sayyid Dirāz and his family are the “Ghost Writers” par excellence of Upper Egypt. Their first-hand narrative of excavation over thirty years of work in the field is the best documented example we have of the fundamentally multilingual process of archaeological knowledge production in Egypt and Sudan.

„Ḥamā lam tamut” (“Hama did not die”) – Remembering the Hama Massacre after the Fall of the Assad Regime

By Anna Christina Scheiter. With the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, the brutal violence with which the regime had held on to power for 54 years came increasingly and overwhelmingly into the public eye. The Hama massacre in February 1982 is a momentous example of this violence. This central and defining event of Assad’s rule, which was a strong taboo for decades and has never been discussed or dealt with publicly, is now openly and freely commemorated for the first time and the victims are mourning on the occasion of its 43rd anniversary in February 2025. Addressing the Assad regime’s atrocities of the last 54 years openly at last and seeking justice for its victims is central for social reconciliation and a basis for the establishment of a new collective identity after the end of the dictatorship.

“Affectueusement, Laila”: Being a Communist “Foreign” Woman in Post-colonial Egypt

By Rim Naguib. Naguib’s research surveys a process of securitization of nationality and foreigners’ residence, whereby the right to Egyptian nationality and to residence in Egypt were instrumentalized in the colonial and post-colonial policing of leftist internationalist ideas and movements. While analyzing state practice, Naguib also inquires into how this particular policing technique impacted the lives of individuals, and how those who were the most likely targets of deportation resisted their remov-al in different ways. The story of Noémie Canel is one such account.

Decolonization of Migration in Divided Berlin: Berliner Künstlerprogramm and Artistic Representations of Migrant Subjectivities in the 1970s

By Nazan Maksudyan. This contribution forms a part of a broader research agenda on the aestheticization of migration in France and Germany during the 1970s. It focuses on aesthetic representations of migrant subjectivities and the critique of labor migration in the context of arts and cultural production. The overall project adopts a sound studies perspective, and in this brief exposition, I focus on the concept of artistic residency and the invitation of artists from the “European South” to intervene in migration debates with an aestheticized frame.

Towards Syrian-led Transitional Justice

By Anne-Marie McManus. Images of joyful men and women waving Syria’s three-starred flag last weekend confirmed that many Syrians view the rapid overthrow of the Assad regime on December 8 as a revolution. Today, Syria’s political future is unclear, as the crowds celebrating on the streets of Damascus, Homs, and Hama know well. It is a mistake for European observers to attribute their optimism to naiveté. At this moment of opening and uncertainty – when Syrians, against all expectations and odds, have freed themselves from a decades-old dictatorship – their choice to publicly embrace national unity is a political stance.

“One of the most striking challenges I encounter in theology is its rigidity and binary thinking” – 5in10 with Abeer Khshiboon

Abeer Khshiboon is a scholar specializing in intersections of religiosities, indigeneities, and postcolonial studies. She received her first MA in Education from the University of Haifa, a second MA in Jewish Theology from the School of Jewish Theology at the University of Potsdam. Her doctoral research at the Theological Faculty, Humboldt University of Berlin deals with the historical trauma of Christian internally displaced Palestinians, which deepened her appreciation for local cultures of remembrance and resilience.

Poor Connections

By Jeremy F. Walton. In this contribution to the “Beyond Guidelines” Series, Jeremy F. Walton sheds light on a neglected aspect of the heavily ethicized field of European academia: the manner in which research ethics as a fantasy of best academic practice abets and exacerbates longstanding regional hierarchies among nation-states, and fundamentally complicates the professional lives of scholars who mediate between pan-European discourses and local institutions. There are connections here that have yet to be adequately grasped.

Translation in Multiple Diasporic Contexts – Yasmeen Hanoosh in conversation with maia tabet

maia tabet and Yasmeen Hanoosh are Arabic-English literary translators who have spent decades living and translating from multiple diasporic locales. In this conversation, they retrace the trajectories of their experience as translators, uprooted Arab women, and bilingual diasporic subjects to identify intersections and divergences along their paths.

a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies

By Hashem Abushama. This essay was the winner of the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize, a project initiated by the Stuart Hall Foundation. The award was presented at the 7th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in March 2024, also organised by the Foundation. The judges said: “We found it to be a powerful, politically important and theoretically nuanced piece of work written in lyrical prose. As a ‘theoretical diary’ that combines memoir, ethnography photography and critical analysis, it took us directly to particular places, evoking the author’s personal experience growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, carefully historicising the layers of colonial and settler colonialisms of this space, and theorising their relationships to different modes of capitalism.”