In 1950 Kuwait launched an oil modernization project that entailed the creation of a new city as a symbol of its rising prosperity and progress. The mass demolition of the pre-oil urban landscape that ensued was not only a means of clearing space for this city; it was a conscious act of erasure, of deliberately shedding Kuwait’s past while dreaming of a better future. This process was common to universal experiences of modernity; as Andreas Huyssen argues: “The price paid for progress was the destruction of past ways of living and being in the world ... And the destruction of the past brought forgetting” (Present Pasts, 2). At the same time, however, select aspects of Kuwait’s history were evoked in spaces like the National Museum, established in 1960, which displayed reconstructions of rapidly disappearing urban scenes like old courtyard houses with clay figures sitting on the floor. Such musealized representations of the city’s pre-oil era had an important role to play in the post-oil modernist agenda: as proof of the superiority of Kuwait’s present—its rational planning, advanced healthcare, progressive schools, and luxurious villas—in contrast to its more “primitive” past. Though explicitly involved in acts of memory, such heritage sites helped Kuwait move on from the recent past. Since 2003 the modern landscape created after 1950 has itself undergone mass demolition to be replaced by something newer still. This time, however, nothing from the early oil period is being retained or memorialized, while previously neglected pre-oil sites are renovated and given new pride of place on the changing urban landscape. The demolition of the early oil city in conjunction with the reification of the pre-oil past in the production of Kuwait’s postmodern cityscape creates a direct link between the pre-oil era and today while eliminating everything that happened in between. Memories of Kuwait’s post-1950 modernization, it seems, serve no purpose in the present, and the absence of conservation of any aspect of this era alongside its demolition creates a double-act of forgetting. This paper analyzes and compares the role that both demolition and heritage have played in fostering the erasure of Kuwait’s past during two major urban development cycles (1950-1980 and 2003-today). Through a close examination of state development plans, heritage projects, and public rhetoric in official publications and newspaper articles from both periods, I investigate how and what Kuwait forgets through the constant redevelopment of its built environment.

In Kuwait in Postcards (2009), Ali Rais has arranged and annotated his impressive collection of postcards of Kuwait from the 1920s to the 1970s. Algerian writer Malek Alloula has stated that the postcard “straddles two spaces: the one it represents and the one it will reach” (Colonial 4). Rais’s publication creates an unintentional boomerang effect since the postcards, produced specifically to travel beyond Kuwait, have now returned home. I suggest that the postcard, as unlikely historical fragment, can reveal not only an overlooked national narrative but also why this particular narrative has been forgotten. This overlooked national narrative can be detected in the postcards from the late 1950s to the 1970s. These decades correspond to the post-oil period in Kuwait generally recognized as its modernity. In postcards, this period is depicted through images of an energetically developing nation-state and includes images of art deco buildings, ministries, a parliament, clean city streets, cinemas, casinos, busy beaches, fountains, parks, schools, hospitals, a university campus, markets, cars, beachfront hotels, etc. Together, these images construct a “phantasm,” which gets produced, according to Gilles Deleuze, “when sensibility transmits its constraint to the imagination [and] the imagination in turn is raised to the level of transcendent exercise” (Difference 144). A phantasm may be understood as an effect of the imagination confronting what has not necessarily been fully actualized but what may yet come to be. The phantasm constructed by the postcards in question was not only an effect of how Kuwait saw itself at that time but also of how it wanted to represent itself to those beyond its borders. My paper (informed by Alloula, Deleuze, Derrida, and Ricoeur and utilizing a cultural studies approach) will focus, first, on the link between these phantasmic representations in postcards (Rais) and the socio-political agenda during Kuwait’s modernity, and, second, on the function served today by forgetting the phantasm. Forgetting the phantasm makes it possible to construct a historical narrative that elides the national image of Kuwait as open, modern, efficient, democratic, and “westernized”; in so doing, it restricts the national image to religious and tribalist representations currently circulating as historical “truth.” In addition, forgetting the early promises of the nation-state makes it possible to disregard its serious failures. Reckoning with these postcard memories can, at the very least, shift Kuwait’s univocal conception of its national history and, rather more optimistically, challenge an often inept and stultified present.

Paul Lovejoy has estimated that 800,000 enslaved Africans were sent to destinations in Asia in the nineteenth century as part of the East African slave trade in the Indian Ocean, with Eastern Arabia absorbing the largest proportion of this population. Although the demographic impact of this forced migration is visible throughout the region today, enslaved Africans remain largely invisible in official histories of Gulf states. Museum exhibits in Oman and the Emirates feature images of Arab workers performing work that was historically dominated by African labor, and African influences on regional artistic traditions are often explained through trade relationships with East Africa rather than the lasting impact of imported African populations. A conspicuous absence of social movements among descendants of enslaved Africans in the Gulf which might press for recognition or reparation for slavery or seek wider Pan-African solidarity distinguishes the Gulf from many other post-slave societies. This paper examines memory and slavery in Oman and the UAE and argues against conventional interpretations of slavery in the Middle East which distinguish “Islamic slavery” from slavery in other parts of the world. Classic works on Middle Eastern slavery by Gordon, Segal, Lewis, and Toledano highlight conditions of slavery in the Middle East which contrast sharply with the Atlantic world, particularly the labor performed by slaves—concentrated among elites as soldiers, concubines, eunuchs, retainers and domestics—or work outside of the productive sector. Yet in the Gulf, enslaved Africans were vital to production in the pearl diving and date producing sectors, and labor more closely resembled Atlantic than so-called “Islamic” slavery. How, therefore, can we understand the “forgetting” of the vital role of African labor in contemporary Gulf societies? Drawing on the work of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Eve Troutt-Powell, and using documentary sources from British archives (Gulf Administration papers from the India Office Records in the British Library and the Slave Trade, Admiralty, and Colonial series in the Public Records Office) and published official histories in Arabic from Oman and the United Arab Emirates, this paper argues that the distinction of slavery in the Gulf lies not with either the type of labor or the religious context, but with the shared experience in the region following the simultaneous collapse of the pearl and date industries as a result of global economic forces and subsequent transformations in Gulf slavery.

This paper examines official and personal Omani accounts of the 1964 Zanzibari revolution and its aftermath. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Oman and Zanzibar, official and local histories in Oman as well as archival documents in London and Zanzibar, it explores understandings and descriptions of the revolution’s causes, its perpetrators, and its victims. Though Zanzibar gained independence from Britain in 1963, many African-identified Zanzibaris feared that the subsequent parliamentary elections would simply reinstate the island’s “Arab” elite. And, indeed, in January 1964, in the aftermath of the elections, armed revolt broke out, leading to the massacre and expulsion of thousands of people who were popularly identified as “Arab.” This event, and especially later news that officials of the new post-independence Zanzibari state were forcing some remaining Arab women to marry them and encouraging other men to do the same, have left indelible marks on personal and national accounts of Oman’s past in East Africa. Undoubtedly, such accounts of violence have helped shape national identity through a sense of shared trauma and victimhood. However, many questions remain: What are the differences between accounts of those who were either witness to or contemporaries of these events and accounts of those, much younger Omanis, who were not? How are social, political, and economic hierarchies and resentments presented? How are they occluded? And, to what affects? This paper illustrates how different Omani accounts of the Zanzibari revolution also often reveal personal and national nostalgia for life in East Africa, reflect people’s subtle attempts to grapple with the political, social, and economic conditions of the revolution’s eruption, and indicate tensions and hierarchies between various groups of Omanis who had lived in East Africa. Ultimately, this paper also argues that in addition to helping to shape a shared yet fragile national identity, accounts of the violence of the Zanzibar revolution have sometimes reinforced and sometimes raised doubts about notions of a shared Omani “Arabness.”