This paper examines the practices and imaginaries through which the future submergence of Yusufeli, a northeastern town in Turkey, is currently experienced by its inhabitants. While the entire town center and nineteen villages will be inundated under a dam reservoir, life in Yusufeli is not merely reduced to a sense of decay and destruction. Rather, my ethnography of Yusufeli as an ongoing socio-material construction site reveals the ways in which the dam-building process produces a politics of negotiation, a trope of (self-)sacrifice and docility, and a notion of salvaged and resettled nature. Yusufeli is known as a stronghold—and, in fact, the birthplace—of the Justice and Development Party that has been ruling the country for the last 18 years. Its inhabitants, therefore, engage in a politics of negotiation and compensation with the government by framing the dam-induced environmental and spatial losses as their self-sacrifice for the greater national good. I, therefore, argue that we need to go beyond the binary of “resistance against” vs. “submission to and/or aspiration for" infrastructures, on which social studies of infrastructure and development have mostly focused in their analysis of political responses to such projects. Moreover, by tracing local state officials’ and engineers’ attempts to compensate for the sacrifice zones, this paper critically analyzes the practice of what I call salvage agriculture – a form of technical intervention to save “endangered” socio-natures, such as agricultural soil and fruit trees, in advance of the submergence. These practices, so I contend, transform historical socio-natural landscapes into a modular, ahistorical, and moveable “nature” and serve to shift public attention from dam-induced socio-natural destruction to a process of reconstruction.

On August 17, 1999, a devastating earthquake occurred in Northwestern Turkey. The magnitude of the earthquake was 7.2, claiming approximately 18,000 lives. Many buildings in eastern Marmara were severely damaged or destroyed, while most industrial sites, transportation and communication lines shared a similar fate. Since the earthquake, a number of scientific studies and projects, both international and national, have been conducted, concluding that another earthquake at the magnitude of at least 7 will hit Istanbul, causing at least 30 thousand deaths and the collapse of over 50 thousand buildings. Even though there is a consensus among scientists that an earthquake will happen again in Istanbul, earth scientists do not have an agreement about the actual location, size, and shape of the faultline, leading to a plethora of different theories and arguments about the expected earthquake. Driving from Science and Technology Studies, this paper aims to unfold the ways in which earth scientists produce scientific knowledge about the fault and discuss it with other scientists. Based on fieldwork, this paper not only aims to understand why there are different earthquake theories but more importantly investigates how these theories constitute and contribute to new governmental policies in the name of being prepared for the expected disaster.

The construction of histories of modern art from the Southwest Asia/North Africa region (the “Middle East”) often includes theorizations of a broken, nonlinear sense of time and questions related to the reconstitution of an intact chronology. The resonance of this mode of viewing the past can be detected in a historiographical reading of modern art history in Egypt, in particular. As scholars like Omar Kholief and Dina Ramadan have touched upon, writing a modern Egyptian art history is complicated both by the absence of an organized archive in the field of Egyptian modern art (described by Kholief in “Tracing Routes: Debating Modernism, Mapping the Contemporary,” in Imperfect Chronology: Arab Art from the Modern to the Contemporary: Works from the Barjeel Art Foundation, ed. Omar Kholeif with Candy Stobbs (London: Whitechapel Gallery and Munich, London, and New York: Prestel Verlag, 2015), 17) and, respectively, by the dialectics present in the history of art writing within Egypt itself (outlined by Ramadan in “Cultivating Taste, Creating the Modern Subject: Sawt el-Fannan and Art Criticism in 1950s Egypt,” Middle East Studies Association Bulletin 42, no. 1/2 (Summer/Winter 2008): 30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/23063539). My research focuses on modern art in Egypt in the era after WWII, a time in which instability, decolonial revolution, and new conceptions of nationalist imperatives reshaped life within the newly independent Egyptian nation. Under these circumstances, I ask: how might we use artworks themselves as documents to understand how artists conceptualized time during this period in which chronology “broke”? In this paper I examine artworks by Hamed Owais, Tahia Halim, and Inji Efflatoun in order to chart how artists envisioned the future (as in Owais’s mechanically rendered, Mexican-muralist-inspired At the Aswan Dam); how they documented the realities of the revolution (such as, for instance, in Halim’s In the Old Nubia Town, which depicts a village about to be destroyed by the state project of the Aswan High Dam); and how they attempted to look beyond, into the timeless and universal associated with abstraction (as Efflatoun does through her shimmering technique dubbed “white light,” which she employed to evoke the particular quality of the Egyptian landscape). I propose that a close reading of the work of these artists gives new insight into the lived experience of the temporal shifts which we view in retrospect as the fracturing of chronology.

In recent years temporality has become increasingly unsettled in Palestinian cultural production, as writers, artists, and filmmakers have reexamined the relationship between the Palestinian present, past, and future. Examples include Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Palestinian Comedies, Elia Suleiman’s film The Time that Remains, Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail, and Ala Hlehel’s Au Revoir, Akka. While these works vary widely in scope, medium, style, and genre, they reflect an impulse to peer beyond a present moment of spatial constriction and political stagnation. While these works intersect with questions of memory, prevalent in Palestinian representations, they also delve into pasts that fall outside of living memory and into futures that cannot be remembered. In this presentation, I analyze two works that draw on fragmented pasts to imagine distinct and jarring potential Palestinian futures. The first, Larissa Sansour’s Nation Estate, depicts a future in which the entire “State of Palestine” is constituted within a single building. The second, Ibtisam Azem’s The Book of Disappearance, alternates between a near future in which all Palestinians suddenly disappear one night, and the writings of a Palestinian journalist who vanished and left behind a fragmented account of his grandmother’s memories as a survivor of the Nakba in Jaffa interspersed with his own experiences as a Palestinian in 21st century Tel Aviv. I argue that both works, by imagining unthinkable that produce either a Palestine without Palestinians, or Palestinians without Palestine, interrogate the parameters of the Palestinian future as it has been imagined politically and culturally. This future orientation entails looking beyond the nation-state as a Palestinian aspiration through reminders that this model has – and will – fail to liberate Palestinians and Palestine. I consider the means by which these works do this, including the rejection of linear, historical time – often associated with the nation-state – in favor of a jagged and incongruous juxtaposition of multiple potential pasts and futures in a circular and repetitive manner. They also question the power of artifact and trace to legitimize present and future territorial claims and the ability of national symbols to produce meaningful identities, thereby unsettling the notion of the nation-state as an entity of cohesive historical origins that teleologically produces a particular present and future. In a moment of increasing skepticism towards the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, these works show that going beyond this framework requires a renegotiation of the relationship between past, present, and future.

Iranian futurism, as a cultural current that imagines the future of Iran and the world through scientific and technological progress, remains one the most understudied subjects in the field of Iranian modernity. Since the early years after the onset of the Constitutional Revolution, when the emerging middle class, disgruntled by the socio-political mayhem caused by the revolution, saw technoscience as an alternative means to modernize the country, Iranian futurism has shed light on social and political issues in the present while also projecting future imaginaries. Sadeq Heyadat’s 1933 famous short story, S.G.L.L (Seen Ghaff Laam Laam) is exemplary of a post-Constitutional futurism where scientific attempt at population control leads to a nightmarish urban reality. With this literary tradition in the background, this paper studies the works of Masoud Khayam, an engineer turned writer and one of the country’s foremost futurists, in terms of the historical context of futurist genre, and also its contribution to Iranian modernity. Through a close reading of Taamol?t-e Interneti (Internet Reflections) [1997], the paper argues how Khayam’s futurism provides the first philosophical literary account of cyberspace in Iran. Through fictional dialogues and series of philosophical reflections, cyberspace is imagined as both tele-communicative and automation spaces wherein the future worlds come to be realized through the quest for scientific knowledge. Taamol?t-e Interneti, the paper shows, was published in response to the growing popularity of the internet in early Reformist period, when it was introduced to the country’s educational sector by the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) in 1993 and later spread through the Qum seminary in 1995. Finally, in connection with Khayam’s works, the paper argues how post-revolutionary Iranian futurism is punctuated by paradoxes: while predominantly modernist, it has a tendency for emphasizing Iranian identity in reference to linguistic traditions; while calling for interruption between formal and everyday cultures, it values continuity of information technology above others forms of transhuman expressions; while “computerized life” is glorified, attaining autonomy through technology is questioned because of increasing automation of life.