This paper analyzes the social, poetic and affective labor being accomplished on the street during the first massive popular political movement in Algeria since the 1990s “Black Decade.” In early spring of 2019, a song originating from the soccer stadium became an anthem as political protests erupted around Algeria, in what became known as al-Hirak (“the movement”). The song, Casa del Mouradia by Ouled el-Bahdja, strongly criticized the regime, poetically stating that “the past archived is the voice of freedom” (wle passé raw archivé bla voix ‘nta al-huria), a desire to “archive” painful elements of the country’s past. In this paper, I draw upon 18-months of ethnographic fieldwork in Oran, Algeria before, during, and after the climax of this protest movement. I examine how al-Hirak forced Algerians of all ages to reckon with a variety of difficult and triumphant memories in order to build a popular movement. “Revolution” has long been a central concept for the post-colonial Algerian imagined community, serving over the nearly 60 years since independence as the ultimate source of political legitimacy for Algeria’s autocratic political regime. Since its beginning, many Algerians considered al-Hirak to be the “second revolution,” and therefore, protestors drew readily upon imagery, slogans, and concepts from the Revolution of 1962. Protestors also remixed slogans from other times and places of political uprising, such as the violently suppressed 1988 Algerian protest movement and the 2011 Arab Spring. In this paper, I argue that in addition to this work of “remembering” other times and places of revolution, Algerians were also confronted with the much more difficult task of “actively forgetting” other painful times and places. “Archiving the past,” I argue, has been essential for allowing Algerians to mobilize en mass, including the characteristic participation of women, children and the elderly. Young protestors, many of whom did not experience the 1990s Black Decade firsthand, worked hard to move beyond memories and fears of the “return to violence.” Popular songs such as Casa del Mouradia told protestors they had been “hoodwinked” (Hshawhena) by the political manipulation of the civil war for the benefit of those in power. Drawing upon pictures, videos and commentaries I collected on the street during protests, I argue that an analysis of this political and creative work of remembering and “actively forgetting” can provide MESA scholars with new avenues for understanding how national narratives and collective memories are generated in 21st century Algeria.

This paper analyzes the relationship between loss, collecting, and memory in two institutional settings in Turkey: The Turkish Seed Gene Bank (TSGB), Turkey’s first central, national plant conservation institution that opened in 2010, and The Museum of Innocence, established in 2012, four years after the publication of Nobel Prize winner Orhan Pamuk’s eponymous international bestseller. Drawing on multi-year ethnographic fieldwork conducted at the TSGB, the paper first demonstrates how the TSGB was founded upon a historical understanding of loss of land, sovereignty, and national biowealth, and how through mundane memory practices intrinsic to conservation, conservationists retraced, remembered, and reshaped such historical narratives in the course of their everyday work. The paper then shows that such remembrances at the TSGB culminated in narratives of loss that amounted to a sort of self-knowledge, a creative situating of oneself in Turkish history. Built less than two years after and 300 miles apart from the TSGB, the Museum of Innocence can be seen as a living argument for the relationship between loss, collection, and memory, as well as an exhibit of Turkish material culture in the second half of the 20th century. Home to objects that supposedly belong to the eponymous novel’s protagonist Kemal’s beloved, Füsun, the museum is a first in Turkey in its blending of fact and fiction, and its explicit problematization of this divide through its exploration of the work of memory. Infused with the soul of the moments in which they intersected with the characters’ lives in the novel, the displayed objects in the museum lie in their cases as tokens of memory and intimacy, as well as material constituents of personal and socio-cultural histories. Juxtaposing the collection and conservation practices in Pamuk’s novel and museum with those at the TSGB, this paper analyzes the cultural underpinnings of collecting in modern Turkey. By paying particular attention to the historical narratives of loss tied memory practices at the TSGB and Pamuk’s depiction of the guilt and the pride of the collector in his novel, it examines the role that historicity plays in the organization, legitimization, and narrativization of institutional collection and conservation practices in Turkey.

This paper considers the politics of archiving and memorializing Arab anticolonial histories and Third World clandestine movements. It reflects on my experience at the American University of Beirut archiving the personal records of the Arab Nationalist and historian, Dr. Constantine Zurayk (1909-2000). Dr. Zurayk’s contributions have been pivotal to the anticolonial struggle in Arab World, and he is credited with coining the term al-Nakba (??????) with the publication of his book, The Meaning of the Nakba (1948). The paper outlines the challenges of applying the dominant western archival methods to such Third World archives while exploring alternative ways of archiving that can capture the liberatory potential of the many records, publications, documents, pictures and videos produced by anticolonial movements in the last century. To illustrate my argument, I consider Dr. Zurayk’s work and records about two intertwined moments of Arab political crisis and traumatic mass violence in the last century: the 1948 al-Nakba (??????, ‘catastrophe’); and the 1967 al-Naksa ( ??????, ‘setback’). Drawing on multilingual records from this collection, and UNESCO’s central archives in Paris, the paper introduces hitherto unknown information about his activities in the 1950s and 1960s at the United Nations. Ultimately, it highlights his influential interventions on Arab historicity, identity and heritage, which emphasized dynamism, change and solidarity as a counter to ahistorical tropes of oriental despotism and primordial sectarianism.

This paper aims to reframe the history of Moroccan anti-colonial narrative by examining Mohamed Berrada’s masterpiece, The Game of Forgetting. This narrative is a stark critique of the colonial and neocolonial eras. It traces anti-colonial rhetoric, with its nationalist fervor calling for Morocco’s independence and the co-optation of these anti-colonial messages in the new neo-colonial era by the elite whose governance perpetuated oppression, akin to the colonial forces, and exploited that nationalistic anti-colonial project. Through this work, I discuss the relevance of Berrada’s work to a solid understanding of Morocco’s colonial and neo-colonial narratives. Thereby, I argue for the importance of his work, its avant-garde and unparalleled status for its narration techniques, coupled with its detailed depictions of the struggles of the Moroccan nationalists in their plea for independence. This work, so compelling aesthetically, so revealing culturally, and so instructive ethically, is narrated through the character of Hadi, the protagonist, whose story tellingly demonstrates the complex ethical and political implications of the Moroccan citizenry and examines the myriad forms and legacies of violence unleashed and experienced in the anti-colonial years, some of which still remain hidden in plain sight. As a way of confronting an oppressive reality, Mohamed Berrada’s greatest accomplishment lies in the complexity of modes of narration, echoing the disarray and upheaval that coincide with war and anti-colonial protest, and pressuring the colonial oppressor for liberation. As the characters struggle to understand the implications that the historic and social conditions of Morocco have on their individual lives and world views, they also struggle to understand each other. Along with modes of narration, Berrada’s approach to memory is consonant with Paul Ricoeur’s critical approach in Memory, History, Forgetting. A significant part of Ricoeur’s argument centers on the identity of an individual being shaped by memory in a continuous fashion, making it so that a person’s identity is continuous. The narrative of memory, with all of its truths and emotions as well as gaps, inaccuracies, and fabrications, results in a continuous human identity, whether it be that of an individual or a collective. In the Game of Forgetting, memory seeks narratives, but memory itself often subvert the coherence of narrative. In short, my analysis of The Game of Forgetting explores forms of narration and memory and the way they are deployed to reframe the history of the Moroccan anti-colonial narrative.

Considered one of his most important cinematic successes, Masud Kimiai’s 1971 Dash Akol chronicles the urban street life of Shiraz during 19th century Qajar era. Lutigari, an ancient Persian code of chivalry canonized as a core social value in 20th century Iranian cinema informs the plot of Dash Akol, which follows the drama between Dash Akol (Behrooz Vousughi), the village hero, and Kaka Rostam (Bahman Mofid), the village villain. Adapted from the modernist writer Sadegh Hedayat’s short story of the same name, Dash Akol’s filmic adaptation takes on a historical dimension introduced by the black makeup worn by Bahman Mofid in Kimiai’s rendition. In researching the origins of Hedayat’s story in the folklore of Shirazi residents, the actors of Dash Akol learned that the “original” Kaka Rostam was a child raised in the powerful Qavam family, and that his parents were African slaves who were killed by their owners. One night, after refusing Mr. Qavam’s advances on his wife, Kaka’s father and mother were thrown into an icy courtyard where they froze to death. The tortuous intermedial history of Dash Akol reveals the complex ways in which residues of Iran’s history of African slavery resurface in cultural production. This resurfacing of slavery memory is neither transparent, nor does it lend itself to a pure transmission of the past in the form of coherent narrative. Taking Kimiai’s Dash Akol as a case study, this paper explores the difficulty of narrating Iran’s history of slavery through the lens of Iranian cultural production.