This paper focuses on the Mediterranean as a connecting space and follows peoples, particularly women– teachers, health workers, secretaries - as they traversed its multiple shores, their journeys related in one way or another to the opening of the Suez Canal. Their arrival to Port Said from the interwar period to the nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956 connect and transgress boundaries of cultural areas, be they delimited by academic disciplines or geopolitical concerns. By conceiving of the Mediterranean as a space both literally and metaphorically fluid, this presentation will reconsider the conventional borders of regional anthropology and historical narratives. The histories and journeys of the women this paper examines link the Egyptian, French, and Maltese shores of the Mediterranean. Middle Eastern studies has often obscured fundamental webs of connection like these, and in this paper I seek to bring those connections to light. This presentation attempts not to rethink these locations in isolation, but instead, to delve deeply into their mutual influences by paying particular attention to the mobilities of women that connect them. Why women? Suez Canal studies have often focused on the seemingly grander themes of oil, finance, and global politics; however, this paper wishes to reorient our attention and accommodate women as recognizable actors in the wake of the merging of the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The area where the Suez Canal sits has, since ancient times, been a commercial, intellectual, strategic, sacred, and utterly cosmopolitan place visited by, among others, merchants, artists, smugglers, and missionaries. As I explore the female peopling that emerged with the Suez Canal and the afterlives elsewhere, I follow women who grew up on along the Canal and later moved on to the further shores of the Mediterranean. The paper will draw on extended and long-established contacts among communities who have stayed in Egypt or migrated to France and Malta, incorporating published memoirs, travel accounts, and archival documents. How did canal frontiers and the societies that coalesced along them transform, divert, or stabilize other migratory currents in the Canal Zone and Mediterranean worlds—and beyond? And what narratives do Port Saidians have about the women who once lived in the city but now have moved to the other side of the Mediterranean?

In 1869, the opening of the Suez Canal shortened the route between Europe and India, accelerated human and goods mobility and facilitated colonization of Africa. Social science scholarship on the canal has primarily focused on human histories and politics. An unforeseen non-human process with far-reaching effects has fallen out of view. With the breaking the biogeographic barriers that isolated the biotas of the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean, a free-flowing water passageway between the distant seas was created. Soon, marine creatures tried this route. So far, more than 300 species have moved northward and settled in the Mediterranean, e.g. the puffer-fish Lagocephalus sceleratus, the Rhopilema nomadica jellyfish, the Scarus ghobban parrot-fish, prawns and crabs. The phenomenon is called Lessepsian migration. Only a handful of species have moved the other way. The Mediterranean’s favorable living conditions (higher nutrition and lower salinity) explains this mono-directionality. Adapted to the harsher conditions, tropical Lessepsian species thrive in their new habitats. With the 2015 widening of the canal and global warming, Lessepsian populations have proliferated significantly, and the newcomers outcompete native species, take over ecosystems and damage fisheries and tourism. But if these ‘bad’ species have been hypervisualized” (Amar 2013) in scientific and public discourse, it should be noted that Lessepsian species are fished and eaten: they constitute one fifth of Egypt’s Mediterranean catch. Despite these migrants’ significant impact on Mediterranean (human as well as cross-species) cultures, Lessepsian migration has primarily been an object of study for biologists. Yet, while a process in nature, Lessepsian migration is not a process of nature only. Taking its name from Ferdinand de Lesseps, the Frenchman who oversaw the canal-construction, it is a result of imperial intervention in nature and the directly joining of two distant seas, unparalleled in history. This presentation outlines my new anthropological project on this unruly afterlife of the Suez Canal. The project advances a more-than-human angle to Middle Eastern anthropology, and provides a distinctly human perspective to what has long been a natural science topic. In this presentation, I focus on how Lessepsian migration can be approached as ‘imperial debris’ (Stoler 2008) as a way of analytically tracing the afterlife of empire in human lives and environments. Through Stoler’s concept, I show how this marine creature mobility is not as an ecological phenomenon only, but a remain from the past that now returns with unintended effects on landscapes, human and non-human socialities and ecosystems.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 inaugurated a new “choke point” in global mobility, both accelerating and decelerating connectivity, as Vaselka Huber (2013) has argued, between the Mediterranean and Red Seas. By the early 20th century, such acceleration and deceleration had become standardized, albeit hardly equal or always smooth as various disruptions to the management of access continued. As steamship lines from the UK to South Africa and the UK to India also expanded through the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, along with intermediary stops, British officials, merchants, documents, and voyagers could, in general, more easily travel. At the same time, Omanis, for example, were more limited since the steamships (known colloquially by mid-twentieth century as “mayl” as they transported mail), while seemingly safer and faster, were also more easily controlled: they needed larger docks at port and the shipping companies were more willing to heed official British demands throughout the Indian Ocean for travel permits. Recognizing the uneven and simultaneous acceleration and deceleration of oceanic travel at the beginning of the 20th century, this paper focuses on the “choke point” of Zanzibar harbor not only as an oceanic cross-road of imperial – British, French, German, and Omani – power struggles and negotiations from both Europe and the Arabian Peninsula or an emerging sociality of humans and non-humans, but also as a site from which the bounds and contradictions of territorial sovereignty were reinforced. Indeed, as this paper explores, in the aftermath of the 1964 revolution, as thousands of Omanis attempted to flee to the Arabian Peninsula or London (through the Suez Canal), the limits of global mobility, as well as the means of circumventing such limits, became immediately and profoundly apparent.

This talk follows a nascent civil society group in Lebanon run by young marine biologists organizing a campaign against invasive fish species in the Lebanese waters. Populations of lionfish (pterois), native to the Read Sea and Indian Ocean, have expanded at a rapid pace in the waters of Eastern Mediterranean since around 2015, and have raised concern in countries across the sea. The lionfish are seen as arriving from the Red Sea through the Suez Canal, possibly facilitated by rising water temperatures related to the climate change allowing for the fish to advance to new areas. The increasing presence of lionfish in Lebanese and Mediterranean waters is consider a threat to local marine life and indigenous fish populations. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among volunteer-run groups on the Lebanese coastline, I follow young marine biologists and other volunteers in their campaigning against the lionfish. I discuss how the lionfish, categorized by marine science as invasive, was conceptualized by the group of marine biologists through their environmental advocacy work. I examine how "fighting" the invasive species was incorporated as part of their environmental campaign work on the Lebanese littoral. Combining transnational knowledges of marine biology and non-governmental advocacy, the lionfish-encounter brought the young scientists and activists in diverse activities and entanglements across the Lebanese coastline. A central part was their campaigning for 'oceanic literacy' – a concept borrowed from global marine science pedagogy – a specific educational pursuit of changing the relationships of Lebanese with the sea. Through this ethnography, the paper asks: As the lionfish was made known, and edible, to the Lebanese public, what kind of new oceanic entanglements were brought forth? What ’work’ did the category of invasive, and its playful associations with enemy-ness, do in changing the Lebanese public knowledge of the sea? How did the categorization of the lionfish as non-native in the Mediterranean affect environmentalist understandings of the species and its effect on the local ecosystems? And in what ways did this specific encounter with the Lessepsian migrations figure in changing relationships to the sea in Lebanon?

In 1860, nowhere on maps was newly minted Būr Saʿīd (Port Said) to be found. The town, already teeming with life, lay on the northern Egyptian shore. Founded in 1859 as the first worksite run by the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Maritime de Suez, it had become a “small city” inhabited by 4,000 Egyptian and European migrant laborers in just one year’s time. While the history of Egypt’s urbanization has been written from the standpoint of the nineteenth-century growth of Cairo and Alexandria, conceived as exclusive sites of historical change, such insulating approach has obscured the significance of transformations outside of these two cities. Non-existing before 1859, Port Said grew quickly and became a crucial node for mobility of various kinds during the first decades of its existence. My research examines Port Said’s dual character as both a port connected to other ports globally and as an urban center embedded on the land. It also situates Port Said into the context of the Suez Canal uncoiling south of it. It approaches this town and this waterway as part and parcel of the same system of mobility. In the second half of the nineteenth century, in fact, Port Said emerged as both an inlet and an egress for streams of unregulated people and goods, moving about the Mediterranean, the Canal, and beyond. Stowaways from Mediterranean and Red sea ports, for example, re-surfaced from steamship steerage crannies in Port Said, their sometimes unintended final destination. Custom-free, or contraband, or stolen stuff also circulated in and out of the Canal area in ways that went unsupervised. My work demonstrates that, while a number of surveillance measures (Customs, police, religious institutions) came to be established at Port Said, the Canal’s intended checkpoint, undocumented people and goods could still enter and exit with ease. Thus, they transformed Port Said into the living contradiction of turn-of-the-century Mediterranean mobility. In 1906, a standard-gauge railway connected the seemingly isolated Port Said to the rest of Egypt, changing the licit and illicit mobility patterns that had woven the port-city and the Canal together in the previous fifty years.