Physical spaces and the social relations within such spaces are the results of battles between stakeholders, such as prospective investors, the municipal government, and community members, over the ability to realize an imagined space. The conclusion of the British Mandate of Palestine in 1948 marked a change in the pool of stakeholders battling to shape Palestine’s cities. In 1948, and with a new national government, the Haifa municipality had the chance to reimagine the city, its physicality and social realities, in a manner that reflected its specific priorities. Then and now, redevelopment and master plans speak to the municipality’s imagined Haifa, its urban design and restructured social realities. Reflecting on the Haifa municipality’s new vision for the city, this paper takes a historical approach to understanding the iterations of reimagined Haifas. To do so, I consider two forms of writing in tandem: master plans and development plans. Master plans and redevelopment plans are both rhetorical objects that prescribe a future reality for a city. While they diverge in their prescriptive functions, they diverge in how they depict the imagined future. Where master plans have grand rhetoric around ideals for future reality, providing broad abstract claims around a city’s aesthetics and ethos, redevelopment plans illuminate the precise methods to reach this imagined reality, noting what elements of the city must be erased or built to conform to the master plan’s image. Through a comparative analysis of redevelopment and master plans from 1948 to 1968, this paper demonstrates that threading together the reimagined Haifas is an ideal of manufactured connectivity, both physical and relational. Bridging the imagined realities of space with their actualities highlights values and priorities. What is left unrealized from imagined realities points to the spaces of contention between stakeholders, the spaces over which stakeholders are willing to exert effort into molding to fit their own imaginations. Which structures remain standing despite being slated for demolition to expand street width? Which planned intersections never come to fruition? In these discrepancies between the plan and reality are battles over ownership and claims to belonging, to the right to shape space, and assertions of what is just use of space.

In “Reflections on Exile,” Edward Said described exile as a “jealous state” that can produce “an exaggerated sense of group solidarity, and a passionate hostility to outsiders.” This paper analyzes works of contemporary Iraqi and Palestinian fiction by exiled authors, reading international law as a force that alienates displaced and exiled Iraqi and Palestinian communities, rather than as a force ideally positioned to ameliorate suffering as is often uncritically depicted in human rights literature. Is international law an embodiment of Said’s “jealous state”—a field exhibiting “passionate hostility to outsiders”? Can the subjects that international law purports to serve, including displaced and exiled people, be understood as these “outsiders”? Alternatively, does international law require structural “exile”—critical distance from national laws deeply rooted in prioritization and protection of sovereignty? I analyze Shimon Ballas’s Outcast (1991), Sinan Antoon’s I’Jaam (2007), and stories by Ghassan Kanafani. Ballas, an Iraqi Jew who wrote in Hebrew, spoke of nightmares in which Arabic took “revenge” on him for forgoing writing in his native language. Ballas’s description of competing identities offers a way to interpret international law—a limited structure that problematically resists people’s abilities to maintain seemingly contradictory identities. These identities may be both victim and perpetrator, or survivor and revolutionary (Mahmood Mamdani 2001). International law encourages categorization—refugee or citizen, exile or patriot. Antoon’s novel is a manuscript written by imprisoned protagonist Furat, which lacks diacritical marks essential for understanding the text. Furat’s only possible resistance against a tyranny of indecipherability—being held on unknown charges—is to produce a deliberately indecipherable text. Through Antoon’s meditation on illegibility, we can consider whether international law places its subjects in a “jealous state” by resisting being legible for those it purports to serve. Kanafani’s “Letter from Gaza” (1956) is written from the perspective of a man in Gaza writing to a Palestinian friend in exile. The writer rejects a life abroad and challenges his friend to return. Kanafani shifts the focus from exile, to the necessity of return. Through analyzing these works, I explore how Said’s “jealous state” facilitates an understanding of exile as neither solely the valorous condition of a revolutionary, nor a form of victimhood. Complicating the bounds of “home and homelessness” (Ella Shohat 1989) I examine how international law has historically pushed its subjects to reflect the law, rather than reflecting the complicated, contradictory realities and identities of its displaced and exiled subjects.

Between the 1910s and the 1930s, women-oriented magazines and periodicals in Greater Syria exploded in popularity. Women who founded, edited, contributed to, and read these magazines, primarily of the urban middle class, were attempting to both construct the ultimate ideal of “modern women” and also understand how their overarching society—beginning to be envisioned as a nation—would function through the lens of a collectively-defined women’s role. Modernity for these women often centered explicitly on capitalism, attempting to give “work” occurring both within and outside the home new meaning. This debate distinctively shaped the class conceptions, aesthetics, and anxieties in Greater Syria embedded within a discrete generational moment. Taking account of various publications’ perspectives and relevant secondary literature, this paper will deconstruct these debates with an eye to explaining how they were uniquely generative. I argue that the debates in women’s magazines were productive of new lines of thought which were not linearly replicative of existing “Western,” “Eastern,” or local schemas, but rather often pulled selectively from all three in order to craft their own visions of what it meant to be a modern woman in Bilad al-Sham. The 1910s-1930s was a time in which women had to deal with changing social and material realities created by crisis. The most influential factors during this in Greater Syria included socio-cultural concerns with domesticity that defined sexual difference in separating men’s and women’s roles, “scientific” benchmarks to evaluate a good housewife and mother, the acquisition of wealth to accommodate luxury expenses, migration flows in, out and around the region, the famine of 1915-1918, and new city-oriented terrains due to urbanization, influencing the regional demography. These experiences and more conditioned women’s relatively new positionalities in determining both what was possible and also what was desirable for the modern woman. In addition, given that this study focuses on the period of the 1910s-30s, which saw the imposition of the French Mandate in the Greater Syria, the debates couched within the pages of these magazines were informed by a mixture of local elements as well as transnationally-derived vocabularies (from within and outside the Arab world), sensibilities, and concerns. By studying women’s periodicals at the time, this paper focuses on how women debated these crises as a collective pursuing a nation-building project—albeit a collective which contained many interpersonal distinctions—and investigates how different women drew on a variety of discursive traditions to make contending and generative claims.

In order to develop a more robust fighting force prior to the Battle of Algiers, the Front de Libération Nationale (FLN) established a communications campaign that sought to deconstruct those gender roles which limited their soldierly forces on the basis of gender. As has been well documented, women played a unique role in the Algerian War of Independence, particularly during the Battle of Algiers. In addition to serving traditional support roles, women made up two-percent of the Armée de Libération Nationale’s paramilitary forces. While existing scholarship unpacks how Algerian women learned of the different roles they were to assume at wartime, there is a gap in the knowledge related to how men knew to embrace these changing gendered expectations, rather than resist them in the name of maintaining their own privilege. In other words, what remains to be understood is why and how men knew to make room for female warfighters amongst their ranks. In the decades leading to the war, Algerians living under French occupation conformed to the French ideation which tied masculinity to violence, fighting, and physical strength. Therefore in order for women to act as warfighters, traditional gender roles had to be complicated. This complication was motivated by a desire to integrate women into warfighters, and informed by a recognition that Algerian men presently understood themselves to be the vanguard. This research investigates how men learned to embrace female warfighters. Utilizing El Moudjahid, the FLN’s communications bulletin, as my primary source, I argue that the FLN intentionally used gendered language as well as illustrated and articulated depictions of warfighters that introduce their supporters to the idea of men and women operating in similar capacities. Situated at the intersection of social-formation and feminist theory, this research hopes to illuminate the ways in which text informs reality, particularly in the context of gender roles in the Algerian War for Independence.