This panel on gender and migration brings together interdisciplinary perspectives across geographies and temporal periods. As globalization, technological innovation, and political conflicts dramatically increase the flow of people and resources across national boundaries, Transnational Migration Studies has emerged as an area of academic inquiry with the potential to re-calibrate current modes of research. Among the questions this panel asks are the following: How can we gender our analyses of migration? How can we transnationalize gender studies in the MENA region by incorporating a lens of migration and movement? How does the fluid concept of 'gender' travel amidst the complex processes of de- and re-territorialization, proliferating border zones, and increasingly complex interconnections between homeland and diaspora? The participants on this panel bring together historiography, cultural studies, anthropology, and digital humanities to address these questions.
The first paper on this panel presents a digital humanities project that reconstructs an as-yet-unexamined transnational genealogy of women writers in the diaspora (mahjar), radically transforming our understanding of the Arabic cultural renaissance, or the nah?a. The second paper presents a study of women in the South American region of the mahjar, and the philanthropy networks that they cultivated. The third paper examines European immigration to Egypt and explores the ways that male foreign capitalists and their families shaped notions of masculinity and Egyptian national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. Finally, the fourth paper focuses on the complexities of identity construction and cultural negotiation among Turkish male migrants in Germany through an examination of leisure practices of a predominantly Muslim immigrant community. With the comments of a fifth participating discussant, we place these projects into conversation with one another in order to productively engage the specific challenges faced by scholars of gender and migration in the MENA region and its diasporas. We will also discuss the advantages and limitations of using gender as a framework for evaluating and theorizing transnational networks, migration, and cultural flows. Ranging in geographic focus from Egypt, to Turkey, to the United States, to South America, these four presentations represent an alternative discourse to the stress on fixity and compartmentalization that has long characterized area studies. From ethnographic fieldwork, to archival research, to the construction of digital humanities and digital history projects, the panel also presents a body of scholarly research that has been executed through diverse methodologies.
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Dr. Elizabeth Saylor
At the end of the 19th century, Syrian and Lebanese immigrants living in North and South America formed vibrant Arabic-speaking communities, established the very first Arabic literary societies, and published scores of Arabic-language newspapers, periodicals, and literary works. Women writers in the diaspora were significant contributors to the development of Arabic literature and culture during a pivotal period of Arabic literary and cultural history known as the nahda, or the Arabic cultural awakening. Despite the numerous literary and journalistic accomplishments of Arab women writers scattered throughout the diaspora (or the mahjar), their works have fallen through the disciplinary cracks and all but vanished from historical memory. To address this scholarly lacuna, this paper presents a digital humanities project undertaken in collaboration with the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. This project brings together, for the first time, research on Arab women writers in the mahjar from myriad sources into a singular comparative focus. Through the compilation of a comprehensive database of Arab women writers in the diaspora – including biographical information and an inventory of published works by writers such as Salma Sa’igh (1889-1953), Salwa Salama Atlas (1883-1945), Habbuba Haddad (1897-1957), Anjal ‘Awn (?-1989), and ‘Afifa Karam (1883-1924) – I piece together the unfinished tapestry of a transnational genealogy of Arab women writers during the nahda. Unearthing the as-yet-unexamined writings of Arab women in the diaspora will illuminate the contributions of deterritorialized Arab women writers to cultural, literary, and socio-political discourse during the nahda. It reveals a dynamic constellation of connections – both literal and textual – linking women writers and intellectuals throughout the mahjar and beyond. Ultimately, by reconceptualizing the nahda as a distinctly transnational phenomenon – and highlighting the vital role played by women and mahjar writers in ushering in the modern age in Arabic letters – this research presents a conceptual model that radically transforms our understanding of early Arabic fiction and the Arabic cultural enlightenment more generally.
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Dr. Lily Balloffet
To date, the vast majority of scholarship on Middle Eastern diaspora communities has tended to focus on major migratory hubs such as the mega-cities of São Paulo, New York, or Buenos Aires. These studies have made great strides in destabilizing territorial frameworks that have heretofore naturalized the segregation of historical narratives of the Middle East and the Americas. However, scholarship’s focus on urban fulcrums, and the Arab-American intellectual, cultural, and political movements that arose in those milieus, has marginalized the histories of other Arab-American populations. From the southern United States, to high desert of the Argentine-Bolivian border, immigrants from the Arabic-speaking Eastern Mediterranean formed part of a trans-American network of Arab-American cultural production, political activism, and philanthropic campaigns. In particular, this paper examines philanthropy as a lens for elucidating the participation of two groups who have traditionally appeared only at the peripheries of scholarship on the Arab diaspora in the Americas: rural populations, and Arab-American women. By directing our attention to both multi-state/province, and international philanthropic networks within the Arab diaspora in the twentieth century, we are able to gain a clearer picture of two important aspects of Arab-American history: 1) the role that these networks played in building institutions (such as hospitals and banks), and 2) how philanthropic networks have assessed and addressed the needs of newly arrived immigrants from the Middle East. By focusing on the role of women philanthropists and institution-builders, this research also explores the gendered concept of the “enterprising spirit” (“espiritu emprendador” in Spanish) that many Syrian and Lebanese diasporic newspapers cited as the impetus for their community’s economic success. I argue that the general absence of women from historical narratives about twentieth century Mahjar communities in South America in part stems from this gendered “enterprising spirit” concept. This paper will also discuss the formulation of this research into a digital history project in collaboration with the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. By converting these data sets into publicly accessible, searchable material, the research is able to reach a wider audience at a time of heightened need for public history on the themes of gender and global migration.
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Annalise DeVries
In 1888, Tom Dale was born in the northern Egyptian city of Mansoura, where his father, Captain Jesse Dale, had relocated six years earlier to work as an engineer on the Nile Delta. It is no coincidence that the Dales first landed in Egypt the same year that the British occupation began. Yet identifying the family as straightforward agents of empire fails to consider the economic reasons that brought them to the country and allowed them and other foreign nationals to remain for more than half a century.
The arrival of the British fleet affected markets and migration patterns alike as foreign investment grew in what appeared to be a more stable country under British control. Foreign businessmen moved into Egypt to profit from the country’s growing economy. Along with the Dales came other British, French, German, Italian, and Hungarian nationals and their families—all of whom arrived as part of private business ventures and remained in Egypt often for generations. These foreigners lived in Egypt for generations because of the extraterritorial status granted to them by a legal system that exempted them from the jurisdiction of local courts and, importantly, from local taxes. Those governing Egypt—first the British and then Egyptians—similarly disparaged of those benefitting from the system until its abolition in the late-1940s, perceiving them as undermining the authority of the state and the strength of a national economy.
Taking a historical approach, my paper asks how pathways of wealth and privilege shaped migration. In particular, it examines how the arrival and domicile of these white European men and their families became associated access and power. Their prolonged presence in Egypt subsequently shaped debates about masculinity, national identity, and the place of foreigners in society. By following the impact of the men who led several of these foreign business ventures and identifying the varied forms of resistance that rose up against them during the first half of the twentieth century, my paper asks how the details of economic and foreign policy shape larger notions of identity. And it addresses how foreign capitalists helped define notions of masculinity and frame concepts of who participated in the nation.
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Oguz Alyanak
The concept of gender played a key role for scholars of migration in arguing that the category of the migrant is not void of differences pertaining to one’s gender, but is rather central to shaping a migrant’s life trajectory. Nevertheless, men’s everyday lives have only recently been included in this conversation. De- and-re territorialization is a destabilizing process for women as well as men, as it puts into question the very values that are ascribed to them. Within the context of migrant men, it is often assumed that patriarchal norms are carried from one context to another without much change. Hence, the practices of Turkish men who migrate from highland villages to urban capitals in Europe are seen as a reflection of the gender norms that define rural Turkey. However, as my research on the Franco-German borderland shows, the dispositions that are ascribed to Muslim Turkish men come to be discussed by the very members of the Turkish community, man and woman alike. One way in which they are evaluated is through their leisurely practices—in particular, their going-out habits. Where do Muslim Turkish men go after work? Do they pursue a life of mundane pleasures in Strasbourg and Kehl—Strasbourg’s German neighbor? Do they waste away their time and money on the streets or in shisha bars and coffeehouses chatting and playing cards, or go to Germany to play slotmachines and visit brothels? Or do the spend time at home, with their family, or at the mosque, with the congregation? How do they negotiate how and where they will spend time after work? And how do they deal with the practical as well as moral consequences of their actions? Based on a yearlong ethnographic fieldwork in Strasbourg and Kehl, my paper describes the moral frames through which men’s everyday practices are evaluated, and reflects on how Muslim Turkish men living on the Franco-German borderland deal with becoming subjects of moral inquiry.
