This paper examines British and French funerals in late nineteenth-century Alexandria, Egypt. It argues that funerals reveal much that is otherwise hidden about how imperial communities were created and connected on the ground and how empire was maintained not only from above, but also in the everyday of this Ottoman, Egyptian, British, and European port city. People with roots all over the world died in Alexandria, and in death they came into contact with consular officials, neighbors, nurses, doctors, funeral parlor employees, gravediggers, gravestone carvers, family and friends in Alexandria, in Europe, and elsewhere. Funerals thus served to underscore the complexity of the population and the unique space within which they lived and died. At the same time, funerals served to allow consulates to claim the bodies of Alexandrians as their own – to turn dynamic, complicated, once-living people into static, defined, imperial bodies. Being there to provide for the funeral, to give those imperial bodies a decent death, served to underscore the importance of individual consulates to the city. The different roles the funeral played highlight the place it had in publicly declaring a body both imperial and local, of Alexandria, and belonging to a now-set, firm category of empire, be it British or French. The funeral was an instant of physical closure, of marking an individual’s final resting place within a national and religious framework on Alexandrian soil. And yet, it sits peculiarly at the juncture of imperial politics, commerce, and culture, both a sacred ritual and a financial transaction, both a rite and a bureaucratic moment of processing and paperwork. In the claiming of an imperial body as British or French, the funeral was the act that not only consecrated bodies into the ground, but also consecrated empire into the symbolic and physical space of Alexandria.

A treatment of one colonial family, across several generation, based on family diaries and memorabilia, the paper turns on the question of why a colonial exiled after the expulsions of 1956 continued to identify with the Egyptian locale. His last wish was to be buried in Alexandria. Using Shirley Ardener’s idea of dominant and muted discourses, the paper argues that the dominant image of the British colony is one shaped by imperial sentiment; however, the paper identifies a muted discourse on the self-identification of ‘British’ with the Levantine community of Alexandria. This might not seem exceptional, except that in dominant imperial discourses of the era the Levantine had negative connotations; it was a signifier of a loss of British identity and immersion into a morally suspect, foreign category. Conversely, by mid-twentieth century the Levantine was identified by Egyptian nationalists as a foreign category. The dominant is here meant to refer to collective or official memory, as for instance recently argued by Susan Slymovics and Sami Zubaida. The muted voice, like individual memories, is less likely always to fit into the norms laid out in a collective memory. The Levantine was very much a muted form of self-identification. Whereas official policies insisted on a culturally distinct British/Egyptian identity against the Levantine through legal definitions of nationality, the paper offers instances where the categories were reordered through communal identification with these marginal, Levantine communities. The Levantine identification of Michael Barker had political ramifications, apparent in the choice to remain in Egypt when others emigrated out, to continue to invest in the Egyptian economy when others divested, and to cling to the remnants of those symbols of belonging, the very last of which was the family tomb. That act memorialized colonial lives that stood in marked contrast to the ascendant narratives of nation and empire.

The Armenian village of Athlit was established in 1926 in Mandatory Palestine by group of Armenian refugees from around Dörtyol and Lapadj in the vilayet of Adana. Anton Hamouda, a Christian-Arab land owner leased them 580 dunam of land of the 1,000 dunam he owned in Palestine's coastal plain. When the 1948 War broke out, Hamouda had fled to Lebanon. His lands were expropriated and allocated to newly-established Jewish-Israeli settlements. The Armenians remained in the Village but lost their source of income and sustainability. They succumbed to a slow process of attrition until the Village was evacuated and demolished in 1981. The story of the Village is largely unknown in Israel, and official documents are scanty and incomplete. Nevertheless for the families of the evacuees and the small Armenian victim-community in Israel, the dispossession remains an open wound. The proposed paper unfolds the short history of the Village and offers two alternative analyses of the conflict. First the conflict is contextualized as a legal case under the three relevant land laws in force in Palestine/Israel, namely, the Ottoman Land Code of 1858 adopted by the British occupation to all inhabitants of Palestine, the British Land Ordinance of 1943, and since 1948 by the Israeli land regime. Second, the conflict is expounded in terms of Jean-François Lyotard's différend, a conflict between (at least) two parties that cannot be equitably resolved for the absence of common quality in the discourses of the parties and the absence of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. Inherent in a différend is the incommensurability of the parties’ discourses and the Villagers’ inability to translate phrases from heterogeneous regimens into the other. The paper thus argues that the victimhood of Israeli-Jews and the legitimacy it apparently provided them became a blind spot to the legitimacy of Villagers' claims. The Armenians cannot articulate or justify their position within the framework of the Israeli discourse and value system. This restriction or the silencing and suppressing the story of the Village by demolishing and erasing any trace and evidence to its existence allows only for conformity or defeat.

Corpses, the uncanny material remains, evacuated of the life that made possible their existence, inspire in Egypt the same primordial awe and fear that is the raw material of ghost stories elsewhere. At the same time, the association of places of burial with power and bounty in Egypt have made them important centers of gravity for the performance of rituals of remembrance (dhikr), shrine visitation (ziy?ra) and communal celebration (mawlid). In Sufi cosmology, the shrine is imagined as a liminal space, where opposites meet: living and dead, sacred and profane, permissible and forbidden. The paper will consider different ways of remembering Sayyida Nafisa (d. 208/824), a great-granddaughter of Muhammad, through narratives about her life, through the formal and informal structural features of the spaces in and around her shrine in Cairo, Egypt, and through a variety of ritualized interactions with those spaces. It argues that Nafisa’s legacy, like the physical shrine, projects the illusion of being fixed in stone at her death. In fact, spaces and memories alike are made dynamic by living people who draw upon them for support and guidance in the negotiation of immediate personal and communal struggles. The memory of Sayyida Nafisa is cherished by some as a model of conventional female piety by virtue of her modesty and meekness, and her performance of the role of dutiful wife and mother. At the same time, her status as a saint is premised on her active transgression of those norms, by mixing with men to teach them, and to perform other public roles. The paper will argue that a similar duality between convention and protest is inherent in the socio-political meaning of contemporary ritualized commemoration in the vicinity of the tomb. Karaitim and Mehrez have argued compellingly that the protests in Tahrir square in Cairo in 2011 presented a host of elements typical of Egyptian mawlid celebrations held yearly in the vicinity of saints’ tombs. This paper will extend their argument, with reference to Mitchell’s concept of “the rhetoric of occupatio” and Bakhtin’s notion of the carnivalesque to analyze how “traditional” rituals and the vicinity of the shrine continue to function as a locus for communal protest. Indeed, the revolutionary potential of these moments and spaces can be understood as an unspoken backdrop for the long-standing controversy among Islamic scholars regarding the permissibility of shrines and their veneration.