In this paper I raise doubts about modernist interpretations of what a successful social movement would look like: i.e., that liberation will come about only if we have a clear agenda that is agreed on by all; only if we are unified; and only if we mobilize, make demands, and deny failure. In many ways, this has thwarted hope. However, along the way I have been given “the gift of doubt” (Gladwell 2013), and the contemporary insurrections give me a whole new way to look at the Middle East, Africa, gender politics, and the world. Using ideas from postmodern, postcolonial, and feminist thought, I analyze recent global insurrections, e.g., the Arab Spring and Occupy movements, but also including Sudan’s modest insurrection of 2013, in order to demonstrate their departure from modernist frameworks and the new possibilities. Participants in the new uprisings, which are mainly comprised of youth and populated by great numbers of women, seek new language, modes of organizing, and formations. I discuss the anarcho-tendencies and direct democracy actions that we are seeing in the anti-statism, anti-authoritarian, and non-hierarchal, but also fragmentary, uncertain, incomplete, and ongoing insurrections. I ground my ideas with examples from interviews with various insurrectionists and end with my research on the 2013 Sudan uprising in an attempt to challenge the concept of failure and exemplify the unintended consequences of the insurrections. Some of the collective and public actions of the last decade or so are significant in giving us reason to anticipate that, even if the “larger goal” is not immediately reached, other positive and hopeful aspects of human life emerge. Using the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell (2013), Judith Halberstam (2011), Manual Castells (2012), Hamid Dabashi (2012), Barbara Ehrenreich(2009), and James Scott(1999), I delve into the hopeful terrain of the current insurrections characterized by “false starts” and incompleteness, grounding my ideas in the messy September 2013 uprisings in Sudan. Dabashi asks to what extent these uprisings “posit…a new language…that accords to them the primacy of authoring their own meaning…” (2012: 59). Halberstam, in describing the queer art of failure e, says that the new insurrectionists have “a basic desire to live life otherwise…” (2011: 2). I end with this question: Will the fluid, contingent, irregular, open, unpredictable, and uncertain path of these new actions lead us to greater creativity and to hopeful possibilities?

This paper explores the role of hope in the work of Iranian publishers and translators of Western philosophy and social science. As public intellectuals, publishers and translators occupy an increasingly precarious and significant social role as gatekeepers and importers of ideas in the intellectual field. Since 2009, there have been unprecedented incursions on publishers’ freedoms, including the revocation of existing print licenses, rejection of new manuscript applications, and the barring of their entry into book exhibitions. In addition, an economic downturn and international sanctions have severely reduced their profit margin, and books of social science have grown increasingly unpopular. Even so, publishers have continued to publish and disseminate books of social science, even in small print runs (numbering less than 1000 copies). This paper attempts to capture hope not as a sentiment, singular political moment, or mass movement, but as a future-oriented element of everyday action, as illustrated by the work of publishers and translators in Iran. I ask: How is that actors continue to engage in the day-to-day work of the publication and dissemination of Western discourses in the face of a shrinking book market, marginal profits, and antagonistic, ever-changing, and indeterminate policies and censorship practices on the part of the Iranian government? In doing so, I hope to contribute to literature that takes hope as both anthropological subject and method. In The Method of Hope: Anthropology, Philosophy, and Fijian Knowledge (Stanford, 2004), Hirokazu Miyazaki points out that the retrospective character of knowledge poses a methodological challenge to exploring hope, since knowledge is generally orientated to the endpoint (as he puts it, its “seen from the vantage point of its effects” (11). He suggests a reorientation of philosophy towards the future can help us understand and enact hope as method. As Miyazaki points out, ethnography faces a challenge in capturing both the temporality of events on the ground and our ensuing representations. I here take up the challenge of by asking how hope is produced and sustained under duress, inquiring about the relationship between hope and uncertainty, and reflecting on the ethnographic complexities of writing about hope.

Last summer, when I was interviewing Siranus --a 45-year-old undocumented Armenian immigrant who had been working in Turkey for more than six years as a domestic worker-- she waited for the right moment to make a confession: “Look, you are a sister to me, I cannot say this to everyone, but what I have suffered most from here for six years is neither poverty nor the harsh conditions of life, what is most difficult is coming back to the land of the enemy, well, a former Armenian land which belongs to the enemy now. It is nothing but a defeat.” Besides deeply affecting me, Siranus’ words left me with the following question: How are the subjectivities of Armenian women immigrants shaped vis-à-vis the drastic migration polices of the Turkish State alongside the legacy of the Armenian Genocide? What does it mean for an Armenian woman to come back to the land of the enemy: is it either an ethical choice or a form of resistance? Is it a hopeful move or a defeat, as Siranus defines it? Referring to this dialectic between hope and defeat, in this paper my overarching argument will be that the significance of undocumented migration for Armenian women in the specific context of Turkey cannot be fully grasped without considering the historical component, i.e., the legacy of the Armenian Genocide. Along these lines, I will reflect upon what defeat might mean in this context and how it is embodied by Armenian women immigrants. For this purpose, in the first part of my paper I will critically engage with the existing literature on transnational migration and will demonstrate its insufficiency in interpreting the possible meaning of this “defeat” in the Armenian migratory process. In the second part, I will trace the radical hope (Garcia, 2014 ; Lear, 2006) in the story of Siranus reflecting upon the continuity and discontinuity of Armenian personhood embedded in this migratory flow.

In the agonistic landscape of Israel/Palestine nowhere has been more continuously inflected by the tension between intimate proximity and visceral violence than ethnically “mixed towns.” In these cities the ambivalence of the binational encounter bespeaks the paradox of the co-presence of political Others who are also immediate neighbors. Consequently these cities are marked by a twilight zone of borderline sociality, which implicates coexistence and domination, hope and despair. This paper follows three trajectories of hope in Jaffa, a Jewish-Arab city located minutes away from Tel-Aviv’s metropolitan center yet marked as sui generis cultural and political alterity. These trajectories extend from the history of nationalist mobilization to binational initiatives (such as the bilingual kindergarten) and postnational artistic activism (or artivism). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Jaffa, I show how the dialectics of hope and despair places Jaffa in a position of troubled ambivalence – the city is depicted as site of nostalgia and utopia, the “museum of the Nakba” and the hopeful future of the region at one and the same time. The 2011 Social Protest, which resonated with the Arab Uprisings, will illustrate some of the paradoxes of the binational city that enabled one (Jewish) activist to coin what became the most powerful Palestinian call for justice. Bridging the national and the urban scale in one phrase repeated during the 2011 protests, the slogan called for "the Right of Return to Old Jaffa."