Transnational Anxieties over Home, Migration and Violence
Panel 027, 2018 Annual Meeting
On Friday, November 16 at 8:30 am
Panel Description
This panel explores the ways anxieties about collective identity and imaginings of self and home play out in Middle Eastern public cultures. The panel's motivating question is: how do cultural experiences and memories of forceful transnational interactions reproduce enduring collective anxieties over belonging? The panel is highly comparative as it draws on contemporary transnational contexts from Turkey, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and the Lebanese diasporas in the Americas and West Africa. It also analyses different modes of cultural production, including television, autobiography, cinema and news media.
The first paper examines the culture of commemoration surrounding Iranian-sponsored militias active in the Syrian War, known as the "Shrine Defenders." It focuses on the image of the fighters within Iranian media and state-sponsored cultural production as well as the critiques these men generate. It argues that this exposes anxieties about the type of Iran-centric, Shi'i nationalist project that elements within the Islamic Republic are promoting. The second paper explores how Lebanese films of the 1950s and 1960s articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon. By comparing the visual landscapes of Lebanon and the diaspora in the films, the paper shows how they critique the straitened choices and circumscribed lives of rural men in the first decades of Lebanon's independence, thereby calling the nation-state into question.
Also exploring representations of Lebanese diasporas, the third paper examines autobiography as transnational representational practice, and its potentialities as a site of feminist theory. Through a close reading of an essay by Lebanese-American author Ethel Adnan, "Growing up to be a Woman Writer in Lebanon," the paper reflects on the political relevance of personal anxieties, expressed in themes about language, motherhood and exile, in addition to the figuration of the West as a site of moral demise for emancipated Middle Eastern women. The fourth paper shifts focus to Syrian-Turkish relations and argues that historical masculine anxieties over sovereignty have dominated contemporary Syrian government-sponsored news media and television series framing of relations with Turkey. The paper highlights how tropes about violations of masculinity play a central role in the Syrian state's efforts to influence shifting public perceptions of Turkey over the last three decades. Collective memories of Ottoman emasculation of Syrians, the paper shows, haunt Syrian perceptions of Turkey as represented in cultural productions and discussed on news media.
In this presentation, I argue that masculine anxieties over sovereignty have dominated the Syrian government-sponsored media framing of the country’s relations with Turkey. Through an analysis of two Syrian TV series, and a textual study of the Syrian press since 2011, I argue that historical memories about Turkish domination reproduce masculinized national anxieties over Turkish entry into Syria, whether framed as a breach of sovereignty or state-sanctioned invitation.
I analyse the biggest Syrian TV series production in the 1990s, “Brothers of the Soil” (1997), which tells a grim story about the end of the Ottoman Empire. The series, shown at a time when bilateral relations were at the brink of war, portrayed Syrian men as forced to serve in the Ottoman army and at the mercy of its generals. The most vivid scene in the series dramatizes in detail Ottoman soldiers killing Syrians by the infamous impalement torture method (death by penetration of stake or spear). That scene circulated again as a viral YouTube clip since 2011 following Turkish support for Syrian opposition and rebel groups. In fact, since 2011, the word impalement has been a popular description of Turkey’s foreign policy in editorials in the official Syrian press.
Before the Syrian War, from 2000 to 2011, when bilateral relations witnessed unprecedented levels of cooperation and openness, masculine anxieties over sovereignty in Syria took a different form. The biggest Syrian soap opera production that dramatized the Ottoman era, “People of the Banner” (2010), showed a Syrian protagonist who had voluntarily joined the Ottoman army (rather than being forced to serve). Though he gets mistreated by an Ottoman officer, a Turkish lady (a general’s daughter) falls in love with him and helps to rescue him— as if restoring honour to the Syrian man. The 2000s also saw the immense popularity of Turkish soaps dubbed into Syrian Arabic. However, following 2011, the Syrian official press reversed positive portrayals of Turkey and made direct links between TV series and foreign policy by claiming that Ankara “betrayed” Damascus even though the latter opened up to Turkey and facilitated its entry into Arab homes through television.
This presentation examines the culture of commemoration surrounding Iranian-sponsored militias active in the Syrian War. Known as the “Shrine Defenders” (Modafe'an Haram in Persian), they have provided significant support to Bashar al-Assad's forces in Syria and in Iran. Within Iran, they have been presented as an essential defense against ISIS and one of the reasons for the group’s inability (for the most part) to launch attacks on the Islamic Republic.
The presentation will focus on the image of the fighters within Iranian media and state-sponsored cultural production and how it has emerged as a point of contention among groups who see the fighters as a needless economic burden and unnecessarily involving Iran in a foreign war. These critiques, however, also expose certain anxieties about the type of Iran-centric, Shi’i nationalist project that elements within the Islamic Republic (particularly the Revolutionary Guards) are currently promoting. Within this framework, the presentation will focus on three main issues: 1) the language and iconography used to celebrate the Shrine Defenders in Iranian media and state-sponsored cultural production; 2) the tension over the national identities of many of the Shrine Defenders, who, in addition to being Iranian, are also Afghan, Arab and Pakistani; 3) the comparison of the culture of the Shrine Defenders with that of the culture of “Sacred Defense” that emerged during the Iran-Iraq War.
In this talk, I explore how the Lebanese films of the 1950s and 1960s articulate anxieties over the effects of emigration on Lebanon. Looking comparatively at depictions of Brazil and Ghana in the films Il? Ayn? (dir. George Nasser, 1957) and Ab? Sal?m f? Ifr?qiya (dir. Gary Garebédian, 1964), I argue that, despite their obvious generic differences - one is a neorealist melodrama and the other is a slapstick adventure comedy - both films share an equal concern with the possibility of using cinematic language to argue against emigration. The presentation focuses especially on the visual landscapes and geographies emphasized in both films. By comparing the filmed spaces of the diaspora with Lebanon's urban and rural landscapes, I show how both films critique the straitened choices and circumscribed lives of Lebanese men in the first decades of independence. Since strong rural masculinity is a powerful imaginary trope of patriarchal nationalist culture, I argue that these depictions of emigrant men cast a shadow of anxiety over the viability of the new nation-state.
Through a close reading of Lebanese-American writer and artist Etel Adnan’s essay, “Growing Up to be a Woman Writer in Lebanon,” this paper examines feminist autobiography as a site to tease out postcolonial anxieties about language and home. Juxtaposing Adnan’s memories to the author’s own, it considers the ghosts that haunt women’s writing – the fraught relationship with motherhood and language – which constitute the condition of production and reception of postcolonial feminist thought.
Growing up during the French mandate over Lebanon, Adnan explores her relationship to the French language as a site of escape from maternal authority and of alienation from home. Here, French schools and culture draw the young girl away from the familiar, ultimately leading to her exile from Lebanon. In my analysis, I argue that Adnan’s autobiographical narration of the intertwined processes of alienation and emancipation allow us to confront the transnational anxieties that structure reactions to gendered transformations and women’s emancipation in Arab societies.
Furthermore, by using autobiography as a method of writing, not merely as an object of study, the text performs the dynamics it seeks to examine. As such, what results is a triangulation of multiple female subjectivities – Adnan, her mother, the author, her mother – whose experiences of transnational anxieties over identity and belonging often clash and converge. Such triangulation, I show, historicizes female agency. In other words, it allows a consideration of the different historical conditions that shape the female subject, thereby problematizing the reified categories of “Third World woman” and “postcolonialism.”
