Over the last two decades, the VideoBrasil art festival and collection forged intensive connections with artists from the Middle East. These collaborations began in the 1990s with early experimentations in video art probing the nature of memory in the process of decolonization. Middle Eastern and Latin American artists deconstructed colonial narratives and simultaneously strove to reconstruct and resurrect local histories. The juxtaposition of stories and histories from vastly disparate geographical regions had the effect of comparing them. The result were compelling visual analogies drawn between differing experiences of colonization and European domination. Works by Lebanese artists like Akram Zaatari, Walid Raad, Rabih Moure, Algerian Malek Bensmail, and Moroccan Bouchra Khalili explore the role of colonial violence committed against indigenous cultural forms—and a concomitant drive to excavate memories of that past. Bensmail’s 1996 entry “Territoire(s),” for example, meditates on the violence of the French occupation of Algeria, interspersing the words “j’irai cracher sur vos mémoires” (I spit on your memories) with revolutionary slogans like “L’Algérie est mon pays, l’arabe ma langue, et l’islam mon religion.” This paper examines the broader institutional history of these collaborations, but also focuses on the intensification of these collaborations during the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Brazil’s president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva forged connections with the Middle East through diplomatic visits to Libya, Lebanon, Egypt, and Dubai in 2003. Paralleling these efforts, VideoBrasil’s 2003 Festival focused specifically on Middle Eastern artists and Global South connections—with Zaatari as a guest curator. These Latin American-Middle Eastern collaborations re-emerged in the context of Argentina and the aftermath of its own traumatic “dirty war.” The 2015 “Memorias Imborrables” (Unerasable Memories) at the Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires featured selections from the VideoBrasil collection. Zaatari’s video “In this House,” about excavating archives of the Lebanese civil war, gestures toward Argentina’s revived truth commission. The video also shows the intense intimacy and local nature of this violence, to homes, families, and bodies. Significant theoretical work charts a conceptual history of the Global South (as in the work of Vijay Prashad), but little work explores artistic collaborations conceptualizing these connections. Excellent historical and anthropological work explores migration between the Middle East and Latin America, but the rich story of artistic collaborations has not been told. This paper draws on theories of the Global South and decolonization, showing how visual artists work toward envisioning what this means.

In the early-twentieth century, Brazil boasted the highest number of Arabic periodicals published outside of the Middle East and North Africa. Indeed, the "Southern Mahjar," which refers to the South American countries to which people from the Greater Syria area immigrated throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century, should be considered a crucial node in any mapping of a global Middle East. Arab migration to Brazil inspired cultural production that crossed genres (e.g. poetry, plays novels, autobiographies) and languages (e.g. Portuguese and Arabic). Newspapers and magazines played an especially important role in the burgeoning cultural sphere created by Arabs in Brazil at the beginning of the twentieth century. The proliferation of Arabic periodicals that is commonly associated with the Nahdah (Arab Renaissance) in cities like Beirut and Cairo was also alive and well in Southern Mahjar cities like São Paulo. While research on cultural production in the Southern Mahjar is beginning to gain more critical attention, the lack of primary and secondary sources that focus specifically on Southern Mahjar women during this period has led to a gap in the scholarship. This has left us with narratives centered on historical accounts of male peddlers and merchants, as well as cultural accounts of a press seemingly written by and for men. This paper aims to address this gap through an interdisciplinary exploration of Syrian immigrant Salwa Salamah Atlas's magazine al-Karmah (The Vine), which was published in São Paulo between 1914 and 1948 and enjoyed a wide transnational circulation. The magazine, which was also occasionally published in Portuguese, was the first and one of the only magazines to explicitly address itself to Arab women in Brazil. Covering topics that ranged from poetry to politics to fashion, the magazine attests to Arab women's important contributions to the Southern Mahjar press. At times reinforcing circumscribed gender roles through disciplining paradigms, while at other times contesting them through humor and alternative imaginings, the magazine demonstrates how writers were able to "refashion" articulations of gender to meet the shifting needs of their diasporic context. It also features unique articulations of south-south solidarities with women's struggles across the globe, thus serving as a dynamic historical testament to the "The Global Middle East" theme of this conference.

Learned and popular erotizations of the Orient have been central to what Rodinson called the “fascination” exercised by the Islamicate world on its Others, as Said noted in his analysis of European Orientalism and Alloula in his denunciation of colonial postcard pornography in Algeria. I will argue that the Orient was constructed and projected as a place of sexual license and erotic possibility not only through translation of erotic treatises and popular literature by male scholars and painters- what Foucault called the ars erotica of the East- but also in the ephemeral staging of an imagined Oriental in women’s performance and brothel settings during the first half of the twentieth century. Though anchored in the world of Belle Époque French brothel, café chantant and postcard pornography, where the cocottes displayed themselves in scant Orientalist regalia, the practice had a global reach, fed by the circulation of Middle Eastern and European performers in the early XXth century. Mexican stagings of the Orient were mediated by a Spanish circuit of popular stage figures, through the tiples genre and the visibility of particular performers such as Carmen Tortola Valencia (1882-1955), a specialist of “Oriental” dance acclaimed between 1920 and 1930 as “the personification of the Orient”. Peopling brothels and stage spectacles but also elite pastimes such as fiestas de fantasia (costume balls), the Oriental erotic was appropriated and consumed across genders in early twentieth century Mexico. I track the figures of the soothsayer, the magician, the dancer and the odalisque that recur in Middle American Hispanophone fantasies of Islamicate sexualities though Mexican brothel photography, memoirs, municipal and personal archives and interviews.

Ceuta (Sabta in Arabic), one of a few territories in North Africa still held by Spain, from the 17th through early 20th centuries was a Spanish penal colony and then home to a military prison and today functions as a veritable fortress prison for African migrants trying to enter Europe. Given that until 1898 the insurgents against the Spanish crown from the Americas, among them major figures from Cuban and Peruvian history, were sentenced to confinement in Ceuta, this Spanish enclave has a nodal role in Spanish empire-building and the vestiges of the colonial enterprise that continue to operate till this day. In my paper I examine writings that either bear witness to Ceuta as a penal colony in which the Spanish crown tried to contain those seeking autonomy in its colonies in the Americas or protest Ceuta's condition as a Spanish possession (an "autonomous city" according to Spanish terminology). For 19th and early 20th century Latin American writers Ceuta was a site of exile and captivity and, once independence from Spain was achieved, calls for solidarity with North Africa as a Spanish colony gave way to Orientalist conceptions of North Africa as a savage Muslim threat to masculinity. Meanwhile, Moroccans writing after independence from France and Spain conceive of Ceuta itself as a captive [asi?ra] of Spain. Drawing on the lore surrounding women captives that arose in the encounter between Christians and Muslims around the Mediterranean and particularly in the Iberian Peninsula with the rise and fall of al-Andalus, Moroccan writers craft a sexualized version of Ceuta as a damsel in distress in their efforts to decry continued Spanish control of the area. Building upon recent studies that consider the role of confinement and exile in politics (Roniger, Green, and Yankelevich, 2014 and Khalili, 2012) and the established role of sexuality in colonial territorial possession (e.g., McClintock, 1995) I examine these works to understand the transhistorical, transcontinental colonial power dynamics that run through Ceuta and use sexuality to create and maintain North/South hierarchies. My analysis of these memoirs, plays, poems, and narratives exposes the enduring structures of power that both create and limit cultural and political alliances between the Arab world and Latin America.