This paper explores the architecture of orientalism in Argentina through an analysis of the theme park Tierra Santa [Holy Land], a popular theme park in Buenos Aires hosting multiple daily performances of belly dancing. Claiming that it “transports visitors back 2000 years to the ancient Jerusalem,” the Tierra Santa theme park replicates the architectural style, including arches and minarets, represented in 19th century orientalist photographs and exhibitions of the Holy Land. At the same time, the belly dance performances at the theme park could be considered as a creative re-appropriation of the orientalist tradition. In this paper, I use the rubric of “the ruins” to analyze how the architecture of orientalism in Argentina adopts the frameworks of 19th and 20th century colonialism, and I use the rubric of conquest to look at how these same cultural aspects of the Middle East have shifted toward appropriation and identification as symbols of resistance in South America in the 21stcentury. If Christopher Columbus can be regarded as “the first Orientalist of the Americas” (Shohat 2013, 50) insofar as the discovery doctrine had already orientalized indigenous peoples as los indios, belly dancing symbolizes these two major legacies of orientalism. Through its organic connection in structure – if not form – to flamenco (Morocco 2011), belly dancing bridges to Andalusia, and the (1492) origin of the conquest of the Americas. At the same time, belly dancing arrived in the Americas by way of the 19th century World’s Fairs and their colonialist exhibits of authentic cultural formations; its popularity in these colonialist venues ensured its enduring image as an orientalist icon in US popular culture (Jarmakani 2008). Following scholarship on the Moorish Atlantic, which brings Spanish Andalusia and the conquest of the Americas in conversation with postcolonial studies (Aidi 2006; Shohat 2013), I explore the sites, structures, and enactments of belly dancing in Argentina as a grounded example of orientalism that both reinforces and unsettles traditional notions of colonialism.

Since November 2015, Syrian refugees have been “welcomed” to Canada in an unprecedented “Rapid Impact” resettlement policy, which blends public and private sponsorship. Over 50,000 Syrians were granted refugee status and automatic Permanent Residency as of December 2017. Yet, relative to other receiving countries, Canada resettled a uniquely vulnerable sub-group of Syrian refugees (very low SES, very low rates of Arabic literacy, mostly rural, with large family sizes and drastic medical/dental needs). We present findings from a recent pilot project with 41 Syrian newcomer refugee mothers in Toronto, Canada (November 2016-May 2017). Our team involves three co-investigators (all Sociology faculty), five graduate student RAs (all native-level Arabic speakers: from Syria, Egypt, Iraq, Lebanon, and U.S. respectively), and five undergraduates (including three native-level Arabic speakers from Syria and Libya, respectively). Mothers were interviewed twice: Wave 1 within first four months of “landing”; Wave 2 before “Month 13," when government and/or private sponsorship ends. An even distribution of GAR (government assisted) and PSR (privately sponsored) refugees were recruited. We find that Syrian refugees are cognizant of being “welcomed” by the Canadian government and everyday Canadian citizens as a highly-marked, fetishized, relatively desirable group of “newcomers." Refugee mothers observe that the warm welcome they experience is predicated upon the Canadian ascription of visible and invisible traits & meaning to presumed markers of class, urban/rural, race, ethnicity, gender/sexuality, and religion. In connecting refugees’ own observations of their resettlement to the stated aims and goals of the Liberal government, the welcoming of Syrian newcomers can be understood as a political and social staging of the success of 50 years of official Canadian multicultural policy as an anecdote to American and European xenophobia and nativism. In other words, it is a staging of Canadian tolerance as anecdote to American and European anti-Muslim and anti-MENA racism. In turn, this "tolerance" rests upon a "fragile obligation," (involving logics of credit/creditors and debt/debtors) in which Syrian refugee gratitude begets Canadian gratification and Syrian refugee discontent begets Canadian condemnation.

During the Lebanese civil war, Beirut’s visual culture was dominated by posters of political leaders, sectarian slogans, and militia stencils. In the past decade and a half, however, Beirut’s postwar public spaces have been transformed by famous street artists, as well as anonymous pedestrians. Calligraffiti murals commemorating Lebanese musicians (or global cartoon characters), stencils advocating for social justice, and rushed scrawls protesting homophobia now intersect with warlike visual markers and compete with them in the construction of public space. The postwar visual artifacts often reflect the attentiveness of young graffiti-makers to intersecting local and global discourses. For example, graffiti artists such as the Kabbani brothers have elevated local cultural icons, such as the later composer Wadi’ al-Safi and the singer Sabah, by engraving their faces on the city’s walls. They have also tasked themselves with promoting the Arabic language, both in its spoken and written variations, by using the Arabic script. At the same time, the Kabbani brothers have incorporated global cultural figures such as Grendizer and Kermit the Frog, characters with which the Lebanese public is familiar due to the ubiquitous presence of global goods, Western film, and multinational corporations. The brothers “Arabize” and “hybridize” these figures, adapting them to the demands of Beirut’s streets. In Askheman’s hands, Grendizer demeans Arab politicians and mimics their pompous rhetoric, while Kermit the Frog articulates the manipulations of a corrupt Lebanese regime. Even when they disappear from the streets of Beirut, such glocalized artifacts continue to thrive online because they “continually code-switch back and forth between the city as a material structure and the ‘city of bits,’ the city as information node” (Irvine, “The Work on the Street,” 236). In this paper, I examine Beirut's polyphonous walls, focusing on the ways in which graffiti-makers seek to unsettle sectarian discourse by literally removing politicians’ faces and “filling [the streets] with the forests of their desires and goals” (De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, xxi). Such acts of unsettlement and reterritorialization often involve a remixing of local and global iconicity. I argue that while sectarian visual markers persist on Beirut’s streets, graffiti-makers have engendered alternative narratives that re-imagine Beirut’s walls—and even the performance of masculinity—beyond the polarizing, sectarian paradigm of the Lebanese Civil War.

Gelare Khoshgozaran, a multi-disciplinary artist in Los Angeles, gave her initial performance of “UNdocumentary” as part of the “welcome to what we took from is the state” exhibition at Queens Museum in New York. This first performance entailed the artist and audience members reading Khoshgozaran’s original declaration of asylum to the U.S. government. When this produced some empathetic and, in Khoshgozaran’s words, “depressed” reactions from the audience, including from queer women who felt they could identify with the narrative, Khoshgozaran altered the performance, re-writing the document to reflect how she understands her life trajectory, as opposed to what queer Iranian asylum seekers are expected to produce to become legible subjects of the state. Her second and third “UNdocumentary” performances in late 2016 were readings of this new document between streams of ice water poured over her, and against a backdrop of user-submitted Google Maps images of her native Tehran. Khoshgozaran’s refusal of legibility and empathy for a life narrative she (in some ways) lived, but simultaneously did not identify with, is a conduit for understanding how marginalized subjects can deploy their “right to opacity,” opening pathways to different modes of life. Employing a transnational feminist framework, I argue that “UNdocumentary” serves as an embodied interruption to heteronormative space (bridging geographical and imagined distances between Iran and the U.S., diaspora and empire) and time (via Khoshgozaran’s literally frozen speech invoking U.S. waterboarding torture techniques). To consider Khoshgozaran’s playfulness with space and time, I draw on Henri Lefebvre’s formulations of everyday life in The Production of Space and Critique of Everyday Life. Attending to MESA's call questioning how contemporary concerns, such as who gets to be a refugee, and how refugee-as-victim is constructed, Khoshgozaran’s performance unsettles borders as it simultaneously demonstrates the violence of them. "UNdocumentary" points to gaps in how the U.S. formula for "refugee-ness," specifically for Iranian queers, cannot map onto the lived experiences and complex reasons people migrate. I draw on Édouard Glissant’s “right to opacity” to explore the productivity of refusal I read in Khoshgozaran’s artistic interpretation of the U.S. asylum process. "UNdocumentary" compels a consideration of how we may differently invest in queer forms of being and opacity, opening up planes of existence that re-calibrate our understandings of what constitutes life. Put differently, Khoshgozaran's embrace of opacity brings margins to center, unsettling how we produce and care for life, particularly life we cannot accept or understand.