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Kategorie: 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

EUME / Issues

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.

Comment / EUME

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.

5in10 / EUME

“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.

Beyond Guidelines: The Question of Ethics in Transregional Research and Knowledge Production / BEYONDREST / EUME

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.

EUME / Issues

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.

EUME / Issues

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.”

EUME / Issues

Why the Past Matters: Personal Reflections on the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life

By Zahiye Kundos. This reflective piece explores the complex, intergenerational sense of loss and identity crisis within Arab communities, focusing on the author’s personal journey of reconnecting with heritage, language, and selfhood amid a history marked by exile, fragmentation, and political marginalization. The author describes a profound attachment to belonging (intimāʾ), which shapes her writing and drives her to understand and heal the collective “bruise” in the Arab heart—a metaphor for enduring pain and resilience in the face of historical displacement. Zahiye Kundos navigates familial and cultural ties across generations, examining both male and female influences in her family and the broader Arab intellectual landscape.

EUME / Issues

On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity 

By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.

Conversations / EUME

When Writing Stutters: Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation

Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory. A Conversation with Zeina G. Halabi.

EUME / Reviews

The Questions that Remain: Conjectures on Cultivating a Relationship to the Published Book

By Maha AbdelMegeed. While the author’s relationship to their work in-progress is fluid with murky boundaries between what is intended and what is actually there, situating an author in position to their published work is just as tricky. Whenever I am asked to write or speak about my recently published first monograph Literary Optics: Staging the Collective in the Nahda (SUP, 2024), I take it as an invitation to cultivate a relationship to the work anew.