Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora

Wendy Pearlman's haunting new book, ASPA Awards, and more from the Summer MENA Academy

I’m on the road this week, and don’t have it in me to comment on the extreme right wing posturings of the Republican National Convention (no, Trump is not going to better on Gaza or on anything else — sitting here in Ohio really makes clear the horrible ramifications of his pick of JD Vance for VP). or on Joe Biden’s delusional claims that he “has done more for the Palestinian community than anybody” (unless. by “done more” he means done more to facilitate their mass murder and dispossession at Israel’s hands). But I didn’t want to let that get in the way of another roundup of new MENA Academy publications.

For this week’s book, it’s exciting to see the publication of a new book by Wendy Pearlman, The Home I Worked to Make: Voices from the New Syrian Diaspora (WW Norton/Liveright Books, 2024). In 2017, Pearlman published the astonishing oral history of the Syrian civil war We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled, which drew on her hundreds of ours of life history interviews (what she calls “deep hanging out”) with Syrian refugees to reconstruct their experience of war and dispossession in their own words. Seven years later, Pearlman follows up with a second collection of oral histories with Syrian refugees, this one focused not on the war but on their efforts to rebuild their shattered lives in new conditions.

The narrative again begins with experiences of the exhileration of revolution and the horrors of descent into war, but now follows the story of thirty eight selected refugees as they remake their lives — and as most of the world has forgotten about them and moved on to new wars, new tragedies, new headlines. Pearlman frames the oral histories with a thoughtful and genuinely outstanding opening chapter on the concept of home and homeland, offering more of her own theoretical perspectives here than in the earlier book. The core of the book remains the voices of the Syrians who she centers and allows to speak for themselves. The method and the argument should be required reading for graduate students and, really, all scholars who work on conflict and refugees; the stories should open eyes about what it means to be a refugee and a migrant in today’s world.

Elsewhere in the MENA Academy, I wanted to congratulate the winners of ASPA’s MENA Politics Section 2024 Awards. Sharan Grewal won Best Book for Soldiers of Democracy? (you can read my review and discussion of it here). Best Dissertation awards went to Hessa Alnuaimi, St Andrews, “The Legitimation of Arab Gulf States through British Colonial Racialization of Arabs and South Asians”, and Alice Baroni, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, “Imperfect Struggles: Jewish-Israeli Activists for Palestinian Rights and the Paradoxes of Solidarity in a Position of Power”; Best Article went to Daniel Arnon, Richard McAlexander, and Michael Rubin, “Social Cohesion and Community Displacement in Armed Conflict, International Security; Elizabeth Parker-Magyar won the award for Best APSA Paper for “Workplace Networks and Civil Society in Autocracies: Evidence from Jordan”, with Rana Khoury receiving honorable mention for “Surviving International Aid: Local Organizations in Wartime Syria.” Congrats to all the winners - see you in Philadelphia!

Finally, I’d like to highlight three great new collections which should be of wide interest to the MENA academic community.

Middle East Report 311: Post-Fossil Politics, edited by Shana Marshall, Laleh Khalili, Kendra Kitzi and Deen Sharp. Every new issue of MERIP’s flagship publication is an event, and this one doesn’t disappoint. Here’s their abstract: Amid an accelerating climate crisis, MER issue 311 asks what a “green future” means for the Middle East and North Africa. “Post-Fossil Politics” traces how the region’s land, resources and communities are entangled with and impacted by the global shift toward decarbonization. Far from being a “desert wasteland,” in the region, renewable energies are being developed and harvested at multiple scales—from Morocco to the Gulf. Our contributors explore these developments, measuring the effects of the energy transition not in kilowatt hours but in their impact on precious landscapes and human lives. As they show, the harnessing of low carbon “clean” energy sources relies on extractive practices and exploitative relations, reinforcing rather than redistributing the existing balance of political, social and economic power. Taken together, the issue provides a sharp account of how power flows—through diesel generators, carbon credits, solar farms, value chains and submarine cables—and at what cost. Yet contributors also call our attention to the world that might be, where popular mobilizations disrupt supply chains and catalyze embargos, care for human and planetary bodies displaces colonial dependencies and decolonial ecologies provide the basis for new forms of sovereignty.

Feminist Africa 5, no.1 (2024). This fantastic issue examines recent feminist movements in Africa, which manifestly includes parts of what we think of as the Middle East and offers really fruitful comparative perspectives across regional divides. You can download the whole open access issue for free. Their abstract: This issue of FA reflects on Africa’s 21st century feminist struggles and movements, paying particular attention to the continuities and changes in terrains, organisational formations, politics, and strategies. The issue is inspired by the visibility of young feminist leadership in recent and ongoing struggles for decolonisation, democratisation, economic justice, and emancipation such as the uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East, otherwise referred to as the Arab Spring; the RhodesMustFall and FeesMustFall campaigns in South Africa; the Black Lives Matter movement; the uprisings against dictatorship and misrule in Sudan, Burkina Faso, and Nigeria; as well as more localised struggles against land and natural resource dispossession and immiseration across Africa. The unforgettable and emblematic media images of AishaYesufu of Nigeria and Alaa Salah of Sudan addressing massive demonstrations, and of young women leading campaigns in Tahrir Square, on university campuses and in the streets in Egypt, South Africa, and Namibia respectively, drew attention to women’s leadership and unsettled notions that they are second-tier players in national, Pan-African, and global struggles. While for superficial observers the sight of women on frontlines was unexpected and new, feminist scholars, drawing on their research on the long traditions of women’s activism, have seen these developments as a specific conjuncture in the movement building, thought leadership, and struggle credentials of African women.

The feature articles in the issue are the outcome of empirical research that builds on a respectable corpus by Africa’s feminists; one that has chronicled rural and urban women’s struggles for national liberation and for emancipation and gender equality since independence, to which Feminist Africa (FA) has made significant contributions. This literature has shown that struggles during the colonial period in which women played pivotal roles such as the Aba Women’s War in Nigeria, the cocoa holdups in Ghana, the Nyabinghi movements of East and Central Africa, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the liberation movements against Portuguese colonial rule in Angola, Cabo Verde, Guinea Bissau and Mozambique, and the anti-apartheid movements in Namibia and South Africa, have laid firm foundations for the more recent struggles against imperialism, neoliberalism, and dispossession.

Middle East Journal: Special Issue: Iraq Since the US Occupation. Special Issue Introduction, by guest editors Eckart Woertz and Achim Rohde; “The Rashid Theater in Baghdad: The Drama of a Nation,” by Hadeel Abdelhameed; “Collective (Non-)Memory of the Iran-Iraq War and Sectarian Thinking among Veterans-Turned-Shi‘i Militia Fighters,” by Younes Saramifar; “Baghdad behind Walls: Mapping Urban Heritage for Spatial Justice,” by Ula Merie and Sana Murrani; “The Evolution of a Contemporary Iraqi Intellectual: Reflections on Ahmed Saadawi's First Four Novels,” by Ronen Zeidel; “Problematic Archives: Documentary Knowledge of Modern Iraq between Ex- and Repatriation,” Peter Wien; “Security and Empowerment as Justice: Yezidi Women's Demands and Perceptions of Post-Genocide Justice,” by Tutku Ayhan; “A Century of Changing Perceptions of 'Christian Militias' in Iraq,” by Alda Benjamen; “Peacebuilding, Patronage-Building, and Post-Conflict NGO Corruption: Barriers to Democratization in Anbar, Iraq,” by Jessica Watkins and Falah Mubarak Bardan; “The Iraq War as a War over the Meaning of Europe,” by Eckart Woertz, Manon-Nour Tannous, and Achim Rohde; “Eat the State,” review article by Chantal Berman; and “The Enduring Challenges of Middle East Security and the Evolving Role of the United States,” review article by David B. Des Roches.