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Beyond Case Study and Exception: The Middle East and North Africa

RoundTable X-01, 2024 Annual Meeting

On Friday, November 15 at 2:30 pm

RoundTable Description
Where is the home of theory? Too often, scholarship on the Middle East and North Africa occupies the position of exception, laboratory, or case study. While the turn to the global in various disciplines has revealed the intimacies of empire and capitalist dispossession, the texture of historical contingency and site specificity that constitute global trends remains obscure. In this roundtable, we center the Middle East and North Africa as a place for the production of theory not simply its application. We approach the spaces, environments, peoples, and ideas we study as constituted across multiple scales and temporalities. This multiplicity requires challenging the binaries of general/abstract versus concrete/specific. Holding these concepts in dialectical tension enables grounded and groundbreaking understandings of power, racial capitalism, propertied dispossession, and empire. As historians, anthropologists, and geographers our work is grounded in the particular. From this starting point, we trace the generation of “universal.” We contribute to knowledge through in-depth interaction with sources, archives, interlocutors, and sites. Ethnographies, geographies, and histories of race, capital, finance, and development, evidences the theoretical and conceptual centrality of the Middle East and North Africa. Thinking across multiple disciplines and geographies this roundtable features scholarship from Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, and Palestine. Dismantling the obdurate mischaracterizations of the Ottoman sarraf as a “pre-modern” character of regional studies, it reads the sarraf as a “theory- machine” of critical financial studies. Tracing the field of “tropical medicine” as a site of race- making and governance, it reveals the peoples of interwar Sudan as central actors in producing and challenging scientific knowledge. Along the tracks of Palestine Railways, it demonstrates how local acts of sabotage constituted the uneven development of British and US empire. From the shores of North Africa, it offers insight on how Algerian sociologists shaped knowledge in the wake of independence. Together these presentations contribute genealogies of categories, concepts, and strategies that center Algeria, Sudan, Egypt, and Palestine. They offer an invitation to transcend the methodological and epistemological confines of the “case study.”
Disciplines
Anthropology
Geography
History
Interdisciplinary
Participants
Presentations
  • Tareq Radi
    Though it has become commonplace to site Palestine as a laboratory for the settler state to “battle test” its weapons exports on Palestinian bodies, both by Israelis arms manufacturers and critics alike, less examined are the ways Palestine’s deployment as a case study often renders it to be a testing ground for general theories of settler colonialism and frameworks rooted in Global North experiences. Seeking to disrupt such acts of epistemological violence, this paper returns to the 1936-39 Great Revolt to ask what an insurgent praxis of railway sabotage may reveal about the relationship between imperial sovereignty and financial stability? Rather than examine Palestine Railways as a case study of British imperialism and development, how might an analytical focus on Palestinian bodies, land, and a collective experience of dispossession in relation to the railway alter the ways we read financial ledgers and understand the flow and volume of capital? Grounded in a Palestinian insurgency’s local obstructions to the circulation of capital, people, information, and imperial authority, this intervention moves beyond metaphor to locate Palestinians as agents of history and producers of knowledge. As the insurgency's acts are expressed through crises of British imperialism across multiple scales, we are reminded that Palestine's place within global history is one of method that exceeds the boundaries of the case study.
  • Dr. Sherene Seikaly
    Where are the Tropics? In 1903, the Wellcome Tropical Research Laboratories opened its doors in Khartoum, Sudan under Anglo-Egyptian rule. The Wellcome conducted a broad spectrum of bacteriological, chemical, and entomological research. It was exceptional in two ways. First, it was established early, just after colonial conquest. Second, most scientific laboratories in the world of British imperial tropical medicine were based in Liverpool and London. British colonial officials established laboratories in a mostly ad hoc manner. The source of this exception was the London based American drug manufacturer, dedicated imperialist, and avid advocate of unfettered scientific research, Henry S. Wellcome. The Wellcome Laboratory was a pillar of building a state where white rule dominated. It was premised on the understandings of Sudan as full of noxious pests, animals, and people. And yet, just as British medical officials attempted to shape a science of the “tropics” and its diseases, they faced a multiplicity of peoples, healers, epistemologies, and cosmologies that challenged and shaped what we know today as “tropical medicine.”
  • Julia Elyachar
    In this presentation, I turn to the Ottoman sarraf as a “theory-machine” of finance. The sarraf is usually read in specialist literature as a pre-modern character that disappeared with the rise of “real” banks in the mid-nineteenth century. Recent research unsettles that account. But what does the sarraf contribute to theories of finance and financialization more generally? In this paper, I turn to moments of ethnographic and archival research that unsettle key tropes of neoliberalism and critical financial studies. From such an approach, capacities and practices of finance turn from exception into the material of theory making more generally. The sarraf appears as a node in an extended “web of time-dated promises to pay that stretches from now into the future, and from here around the globe,” in the words of Perry Mehrling in reference to his work on finance from "the money view." Rather than dragging along the baggage of unanalyzed concepts to the region as a place of exotic exceptions and specific case studies, we can engage instead in concept work and theory making from the MENA region.
  • Ms. Muriam Haleh Davis
    The Algerian Revolution produced a wealth of theorization regarding the functioning of a settler colonial system, the anatomy of anti-colonial revolution, and the implementation of socialist self-management. Despite its status as one of the paradigmatic “case studies” for decolonization, however, few scholars have studied how Algerians themselves reflected on the intellectual tools that were needed to interpret, and change, the social word. This intervention focuses on how the Algerian sociologist Abdelkader Djeghloul read the work of Frantz Fanon, shedding light on how some Algerians pushed back against the tendency to treat the country as a “testing ground” (terrain d’essai) for theory after independence. It reflects on the tension between the generative nature of "traveling theory," to use the phrase of Edward Said, and the imperative to produce knowledge that is rooted in a specific national (or regional) context. In the Maghreb, where intellectual traditions are often overshadowed by the production of knowledge emanating from Europe or the Mashreq, this discussion also raises larger questions regarding the politics of disciplinary knowledge.