In July 1880, just eleven years after the opening of the Suez Canal, a 3,500-year-old, 220-ton obelisk, one of a pair built for Pharoah Thutmose (r. 1479–1425 B.C.), floated up the Hudson River on a barge to 96th Street. This was presumably a gift from the Khedive of Egypt, intended to promote trade with the United States. It took 112 days for the monument to be borne across town and down Fifth Avenue to 82nd Street, to the Graywacke Knoll in Central Park, where it was put in place on January 22, 1881. This was the last of three obelisks from Egypt to adorn the leading cities of modern empires: two years earlier, its twin had been placed near the Thames, and in 1836 the French received one from Luxor, which they erected in the Place de la Concorde. In his book Landscape and Memory, Simon Schama sees the voyage of the London obelisk as an event joining the Nile and the Thames in a “bloodstream” of myth and memory. But Central Park is surely a much different setting from the Thames. In this paper I re-examine how this obelisk affected the physical, cultural, political, and historical landscapes of New York and America, as well as of Alexandria, Egypt, and the Ottoman Empire as a whole. To properly contextualize this “spolium” (though it was not actually taken in an act of war, there was some gunboat diplomacy involved) and its place in its new environment, the Egyptomania that gripped many Americans (supplanting the fascination with Classical Greece and Rome a few decades earlier) must be considered. Moreover, Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty, dedicated in 1886, was apparently based on another colossal monument, modeled on a female Egyptian peasant but never realized, that the sculptor intended as a lighthouse to commemorate the opening of the Suez Canal. Various threads thus connect the landscapes of New York and Ottoman Egypt in this era. In contemporary descriptions of the obelisk’s arrival in New York (e.g., The New York Times and the account of Henry Gorringe, who escorted the monument to the city), the Ottomans and Egyptians themselves are rarely mentioned. Given this absence, itself a form of commentary, it is worthwhile to regard the New York obelisk in light of the Ottoman antiquities law (Asar-i Atika Nizamnamesi), enacted in 1869, which also established the Imperial Museum.

The centerpiece of Hizballah’s Museum of the Resistance is a crater made by an Israeli bomb. The Abyss displays spoils of war: a Merkava tank with its nozzle twisted into a pretzel, hundreds of Israeli military helmets, shoes, bullet casings, weapons, and the like. Along the 3000+ acre site, a visitor is greeted by life-size mannequins of resistance fighters and martyrs, Hizballah weapons, actual bunkers and tunnels used during the resistance, with signs in Arabic, English, and occasionally Persian. Before dropping off the visitors at the gift shop, the tour guide boasts the development of a hotel and amusement center, hoping to make Mleeta a premiere tourist destination; and in a deadly serious tone, mentions that in the next war, Mleeta will be the first place Israel bombs. This paper draws on recent scholarship on Hizballah (its role as a ‘state within a state,’ its jockeying in the Lebanese political landscape, its expanding media reach and rhetorics) and focuses on Hizballah’s occupation of contradictory space(s) of resistance. Combining a cultural geography, political economy, and visual analysis of the museum, the paper problematizes the contradictions of what Hizballah is in ‘resistance’ to. Mleeta is a commemorative space that functions as an act of resistance to certain dominant structures, ranging from Israel to the Lebanese political landscape, from Hariri to Western imperialism. The multi-million project funded by Iran positions itself as a national commemorative space, yet appeals to sectarian divisions; it is located on a site used during wars with Israel and is a target. Mleeta is also a space of popular culture and architectural ‘choreography’ that echoes the (global and economically neo-liberal) trend of intermingling consumerism, war memorabilia and tourism. Beginning with these contradictions, this paper explores how Mleeta is shaped by and produced through various forms of resistance and hegemonic power by analyzing how the space itself is constructed as a space of resistance AND a site for consumption. But the paper also positions Mleeta in wider spatialities including Iran, Palestine, Beirut, the Civil War, the IDF, military technologies, visual displays, and circuits of capital. Finally, Mleeta’s contradictory construction of resistance is theorized as a political, economic, symbolic border-zone. By further expanding on the relationships between culture and politics, consumerism and memory, visuality and materiality, surveillance and concealment, which the museum occupies, the paper addresses (resistant) spatialities and visualities in today’s geopolitical landscape.

This paper analyzes the presentation and organization of the space of the Umayyad mosque in Cordoba through the information offered in the pamphlets available to visitors at the entrance of the building. The building has officially been a Catholic cathedral since 1236 A.D., and today the “Cabildo Catedralicio de Córdoba” (Cathedral Chapter of Cordoba) manages the physical space and issues tourist pamphlets. The pamphlets are offered in several languages, including Spanish, English, and Arabic. The paper focuses mainly on the Arabic pamphlet and analyzes its content from two different perspectives: 1. First, it analyzes the information the pamphlet offers about the cathedral-mosque in terms of how the data is organized and where the emphasis is placed. This analysis will include the photos and floor plans presented in the brochure as well as its textual content. 2. Second, it compares the Arabic pamphlet, which targets mainly a Muslim audience, with the English and Spanish pamphlets. Although presented as equivalent texts – simple translations of one another with the same sources – the objective of this linguistic analysis is to identify variations that may exist between the texts. The choice of certain words in Arabic, English, or Spanish may convey differences in perception and meaning. The purpose of the analysis is to locate these differences and provide an explanation of the consequences of these variations. The paper shows that there is an emphasis through all the data offered in the pamphlets to present the mosque as only a stage of the history of the building. The brochures also attempt to highlight the Christian character of the place at different times in history, placing special emphasis on the Visigothic church that was on the site before the mosque was built. The linguistic analysis shows that the wording related to the Islamic conquest and the Christian re-conquest of the territories of al-Andalus offer certain variations in the Arabic text, softening or strengthening some expressions used in the Spanish or English brochures.

Based on analysis of diverse commemorative practices, including monuments, annual parades, as well as commemorative books and exhibitions over the first decade of the 21sy century, I argue that the Palestinian citizens of Israel have developed a distinct version of the Palestinian national narrative. The unique political status of the Palestinians in Israel, as well as the existence of the state authorities and Jewish Israelis as potential audiences for the narrative have shaped its distinct content. Palestinians everywhere share the centrality of the Nakba as a major anchor in the collective narrative. Post 1948 history, however, is written and processed differently, both in the selection of events to the canon and in their interpretations. The Palestinians in Israel have their own political collective calendar, in which the massacre of Kafr Qasim, Land Day, and October 2000 are central. Although Palestinians elsewhere are familiar with these events and some of them even commemorate them in annual ceremonies, art, and poetry, in no other context these events have become major anchors of political mobilization and protest. Especially significant is the fact that the Palestinians in Israel commemorate the Nakba during Israel’s Day of Independence and not on May 15th. In recent years the parade has even been titled “Their Independence – Our Catastrophe”, a title that consciously narrates the conflict as a zero sum game. Although these choices are commonly interpreted by Jewish Israelis as outright provocations, interpreting them within the context of other commemorative practices would reveal that they are part of a dialogue over civic equality. In other words, Palestinians in Israel tend to frame milestones in their collective history as atrocities of a state against its own citizens and contextualize them in the struggle against discrimination and for civic equality, and not only as a part of a struggle between colonizers and colonized.