In the last few years alone, dozens of newspapers, literary supplements, and magazines have had to shut down in the Arab world. The gradual demise of print media has been interpreted as a reflection of a deeper problem exacerbated by the onslaught of neoliberal policies and the suspension of the political from the public sphere. In articles similar to obituaries, writers have lamented the loss of defunct publications whose fate, they thought, was symptomatic of the collapse of a media tradition historically tied to enlightenment values. This loss has been experienced collectively in elegiac poetics that mourn, not only the demise of the material medium, but also of an idealized historical moment, in which the medium is imagined as an agent that created a field of meaning for the collectivity. In this paper, I examine the discursive implications of articles commemorating the loss of Assafir, al-Mulhaq, and al-Adab. I argue that such obituaries of print media have generated a discourse that is both retrospective and introspective; retrospective because obituaries interrogate the past and return to specific junctures of imagined triumphs, where emancipation was both imminent and possible; introspective because they excavate the self in search of genealogies, cultural and political, that led to the construction of print media as a vessel for ontological questions and a receptacle for their answers. When writers of media obituaries mourn the loss of newspapers and magazines, what do they reveal about how the past is constructed and reified? How can moments of loss trigger a collective process of excavation, a practice of reverting to an early idealized moment of triumph? The question about how the demise of the print word, is interpreted, not as a contingent moment of loss but as a condition of greater defeat sheds light on how subjectivities are constructed, excavated, and mourned.

An Inventory of Traces: Post-colonial Criticism and Self-Fashioning In the last pages of Orientalism, under the subheading of “The Personal Dimension,” Edward Said borrows Antonio Gramsci’s words about the imperative to compile an inventory of the historical processes that have deposited in someone an infinity of traces as a starting point for a critical elaboration. Orientalism, Said, then notes, is an attempt to “inventory the traces upon me, the Oriental subject, of the culture whose domination has been so powerful a factor in the life of all Orientals.” This paper takes its starting point from Edward Said’s observation to investigate the relationship of postcolonial criticism to the archive. The archive has been examined as a site of knowledge retrieval but also as one of knowledge production. In this paper, I tie these two understandings of the archive together by examining how the practice of post-colonial criticism which looked into Metropolitan archives, such as Orientalist discourses, to uncover how the capillary nodes of power-knowledge produced “the Oriental subject” was simultaneously a practice of knowledge retrieval that produced the critic himself. The critical examination of the colonial archive is therefore intimately related to a practice of de-colonial self-fashioning mediated through the compilation of inventory of traces deposited on, and constituting the critic’s self. In doing so, I aim at moving beyond looking at the purchase and validity of particular critical moves, say the critique the epistemological assumptions undergirding certain works to tease out the personal, political and affective attachments of critics to particular theoretical moves. In doing so, I aim to answer wider questions about the different performative labors of theory; namely theory as a weapon and theory as therapy. I will flesh out my argument with a close reading of scholarly and biographical texts by Edward Said, Leila Ahmad, and Saba Mahmood, who belong to three different disciplinary traditions, two different generations (Said and Ahmad; Mahmood) but who share a critical practice that homes in on the discursive infrastructure of thought to reveal its entanglement with imperial power.

In a brief comment on the globalization of professional history writing, Dipesh Chakrabarty points out that despite the globalization of the discipline of history, traces of traditions of historiography, marginalized by the university in the non-Western world, can still be found in amateur history. But can amateur history be understood beyond just being a leftover or remnant of a past before the professionalization of history within the domain of the university? Is it an attempt to authenticate local identities in a time of globalization of family networks? How are we to think through the writing of amateur history in a non-western/non-globalized paradigm that is at the same time conditioned by a global encounter? Looking at amateur history writing on South Lebanon published in the 1950s, this paper argues that this type of history writing was the product of two crises: the pace of emigration from South Lebanon to the Americas and the marginalization of South Lebanon as a region in the newly independent Lebanese Republic. Mining a local archive of collective memory, oral histories, and private papers, amateur history traced personal and collective genealogies of the Greek Orthodox Christian families of the region from their origins as tribes in Yemen, their migration through Jordan and Hawran in Syria, their settlement of South Lebanon, and further along the lines of their emigration to the Americas. Coming at a time when the chains of collective history telling were under the threat of being broken by urbanization and emigration, amateur history attempted to constitute a written record and a link between a tribal, Arab past and an overseas future. The paper places amateur history within the legacy of the pan-Arabism of the interwar years and the persistence of a regional identity across state borders, including the border with Israel. It argues that through building on a localized archive and stories of origin, amateur history posited a challenge both to the conception of the newborn Lebanese state as well as to the professional history writing that accompanied it.

In 2000, the Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué and novelist Elias Khouri performed Three Posters, a video-performance weaved around three takes of the final videotaped message of a communist soon-to-be suicide bomber. Through the repetitions of the last words of the martyr in the making, Mroué and Khouri explored the final days of the left in Lebanon, raising historiographical questions at to the manner of excavating a lost ideology for a postlapserian present. Against the background of this video-performance and its questions, the paper examines the notion of excavation in relation to political ideologies or moments. How do we remember political ideologies, their temporalities and modes of embodiment? In what archives do we look for traces of these political moments? And in what critical projects are these acts of excavation folded? These are the questions that this talk will tentatively examine. The paper follows Mroué’s excavation of the left in his various performances, reading into the changing modalities of this return to the past different attempts at answering these questions. Building on David Scott’s notion of the present as the temporality that emerges in the wake of political catastrophe, the paper suggests an exploration the aftermath of the left in Mroué’s work. From Three Posters (2000) to Riding on a Cloud (2014), Mroué engaged with the past of the left experimenting with different manners of excavating it, from drawing on a visual public archive to delving into family archives. What emerges from this work is the multi-faceted nature of the act of excavation, and the changing political meanings associated with it. From the perspective of a post-revolutionary Arab present, the talk concludes by reflecting on political criticism in the wake of past political time, taking the work of Mroué as an interlocutor to think through the relationship of these acts of excavation to the strategic practices of criticism in which they are folded.