Between 1914 and 1916, Zeinab Ameen was rejected four times from entering into the United States: once at Ellis island, once at El Paso, and twice at Laredo. At each port of entry, officers not only rejected her, but accused her of infection, prostitution, and perjury. Before these accusations and her consequent refusal, Zeinab Ameen had already been checked, categorized, and recorded at harbors in Beirut, Marseille (twice), Halifax, Liverpool and Vera Cruz. Zeinab had left Syria in 1913 with her new husband and plans to start a business in the United States; the transhemispheric journey itself had transformed her into an undesirable migrant in the eyes of the state. In my paper I explore the material conditions of Syrian emigrant mobility in the late 19th and early 20th century, focusing on Marseille as an key node in their journey. Business and government leaders saw Syrians as both commodity and contagion: their migration helped build the French emigration industry, but French officials detested Syrians traveling through Marseille. Using police, shipping, and public health records from municipal archives in Marseille, I track how compromises between public officials and leaders of the shipping industry resulted in a racial regime which policed and stigmatized Syrians as corrupt and diseased, while actively obscuring these leaders' implication in those terms. In this way, I show how the political economy of Marseille racialized the Syrians that passed through, and affected not only where they ended up in the Americas, but also how they were seen once they arrived. Through this paper I posit the use of ‘infrastructures of migration’ as an analytic in studying racialization of migrants in the United States.

Crying boys were everywhere in the Syrian and Lebanese communities of the Americas of the 1920s. Following the loss of the homeland to French occupation, the trope of masculine tears appeared in the global Arabic press in a variety of contexts: expressing frustrated Arab nationalisms, invoking the responsibilities of proper maternal conduct, or threatening the breakdown of Syrian families in light of new patterns of female labor outside the home, particularly in the textile industry. Using a series of comics, mahjari popular stories, and interwar newspaper editorials, this paper demonstrates the emergence of a diasporic nationalist culture concerned with the emasculation of Syrian men through the trope of tears. The paper argues that the familial nationalism which promoted masculine strength and refinement in spaces like reading rooms and men's cafes also fostered a specific vision of Syrian women workers. Female textile workers were a particular sort of emasculating threat. Women's wages underpinned the mahjar's commercial economy, but female factory workers also formed the vanguard of a new Arab feminism which was deeply critical of nationalism and its paternalist trappings. Mahjari feminists, meanwhile, attacked the Syrian clubs and cafés as spaces of immoral and indolent behavior, directly challenging both the politics and masculinity of their patrons. In the afterlife of Syria's occupation, in sum, the mahjar's gender politics inverted, opening new critical roads for feminists but raising the specter of the boys they caused to weep.

In the few remaining passenger records of the late Ottoman port of Beirut, one finds the pastoral nomads seeking to escape forced settlement, the Muslim youth evading conscription, along with peasants from the Armenian provinces or Mt Lebanon Mutasarrifate, on their quest for a better life. They are all but scattered among consular correspondence, police and customs reports in the aftermath of the migration crisis of 1890s, which suspected, if not indicated, that hundreds of fugitives sought an exit from their "duties" and "liabilities" as Ottoman subjects. In this paper I will look at how rural-urban and inter-continental migratory patterns and changing structures of loyalty allowed the Armenian and the Jabali migrants, the multiple, "fugitive" subjects of the Ottoman Empire, to delineate a subjecthood based on negative obligations. The different modalities of governance through which they moved had allowed the fugitive subject to define their place in the Empire through exemptions and exceptions of tax, conscription and jurisdictional obligations. I intend to retrace the trajectories from the Beirut, the port of call from which they took off to become peddlers, workers, and immigrants in the Americas, to show how their relation to the sovereign, the Empire, was mediated through structures of communal, provincial, and urban governance. Based on the trajectories of these 'fugitive' subjects, I want to lay bare the implications for the historiography of migration and diaspora in the Lebanese context in particular, and Ottoman Levant in general. The first implication is the fact that, both the early Armenian and Lebanese migrants took the same routes and rubbed shoulders with each other in their way into and out of Beirut, as well as Alexandria, Smyrna, or Marseilles onwards. I will argue that their shared trajectories warrant a transnational historiography, to understand the conditions within which 19th century diasporas emerged from the Ottoman Empire. Secondly, to better account for the role of maritime cities played as refuge for fugitives, I will then move from the example of Beirut to explain the structures of urban autonomy in the Mediterranean littoral. Last of all, I will argue how the ways in which the Syrio-Lebanese migrants related to the Empire in late 19th century cannot be explained in a singular logic, neither of decaying Empires, nor of ascending Nations.