My paper approaches the question of Ottoman Armenian migration to the United States at the turn of the century through a gendered perspective. Relying on the editorials of Armenian-language newspapers printed in the Ottoman empire and the American East Coast on the other side of the Atlantic, I connect gender, migration, homeland, and spatiality. First, I argue that Armenian political and intellectual elites portrayed migration as an explicitly male phenomenon, and completely neglected women – both in motion and those fastened to their domiciles in the Ottoman provinces. Nevertheless, as written records and visual culture indicate, women too perhaps on a smaller scale were also on the move often accompanying their husbands or traveling on their own as brides or brides-to-be for male migrants residing in the US. As I argue, emphasis on the male element emanated from the editors’ patriarchal worldviews that placed men at the center of society in its broadest sense (Ottoman and Armenian). Perceptions of migration were closely aligned with views of the homeland. In this study, I trace the changing political notions and conceptualizations of the Ottoman homeland/fatherland which continuously shifted starting in the late nineteenth-century, then in the aftermath of the 1908 Young Turk Revolution, and up to the outbreak of WWI. Yet, male-oriented gendered discourses remained unaltered. At different historical junctures, women continued to be sidelined in the political imagination of Ottoman Armenian elites both overseas and back home. By exploring the role of woman as a male empowering agent within the Ottoman context, the paper also delves into the connections of patriarchalism and manliness to spatiality. Women’s presence or absence highly impacted the established system of power relations. This element is rarely acknowledged by the press in the context of other variables such as other overpowering men, that is, Kurds and Turks. The editors and columnists often expressed anxieties over the double erosion of patriarchalism caused by mobility owing to the emancipatory powers it bestowed on women and that rendered its reconstruction virtually impossible within the American context. Thus, in conclusion, ideally, men occupied the center of the Ottoman universe and their stay/departure conditioned the formation or dismantlement of societies, at the expense of undermining the historical agency of women.

The interwar years marking the end of World War I and the start of World War II was a particularly interesting time for individuals who found themselves within the purview of the French empire. It is precisely during the French mandate interwar period that we see numbers of migration to West Africa by Lebanese Syrians swell, particularly of Lebanese Shi’is. The French mandate in Greater Syria also brought a permanent presence of West African soldiers known by their misnomer tirailleurs sénégalais until late 1946. In 1921, 2,500 tirailleurs sénégalais were sent to the Levant. Therefore, during this same period in the 1920s and 1930s with the new opportunities provided by the French mandate, thousands of Lebanese Syrians migrated to the Afrique Occidentale Française (AOF) and British controlled West Africa. I have yet to find a study that has made this connection—that as West African soldiers were living in the Levant, Levantines were making their way to West Africa in search of economic opportunities. The intimacy and lived experiences between Lebanese Syrians in West Africa and West African soldiers in Greater Syria offer a fairly unique case study in the Middle East. What makes this distinctive in the long and complex history between sub-Saharan Africa and the Middle East and its entanglements with African enslavement is that Lebanese Syrians established permanent settlements, communities, and families in West Africa that continue today. It poses questions about how racial ideology and lived experiences of the diaspora in Africa were intertwined at this time and how the presence of African colonial troops simultaneously shaped these ideas. The relationship between the diaspora and home is a well-established dialectic. Ideas, people, cash, goods, books, travelled to and from the homeland to the mahjar and back and vice versa. The purview of empire provided an ideal transnational space where people and ideas could move relatively freely. On the one hand this is a preliminary history of the circulation of racial ideas amongst Lebanese Shi’is within the context of its diaspora in Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries while on the other hand, this study hopes to start probing the relationship between Lebanese Syrians and West Africans at home and abroad during the shared period under French Empire.

Despite supposed Choctaw authority after 1830 over bituminous coal deposits of southeast Indian Territory, in the last decades of the 1800s, non-indigenous “robber barons” such as Jay Gould formed corporations to mine and transport Choctaw coal. Thousands of non-indigenous settlers, mostly miners from Europe and Mexico, streamed into this area that in 1907 would become Oklahoma, United States. They settled in a string of “company” camps and towns run by the mining corporations along the coal seams. Syrian merchants followed and settled among them to sell them goods. Drawing on family records and photographs, unpublished histories, naturalization documents, newspaper articles, city directories, and secondary sources such as town histories, this paper describes various settler roles played by Syrian immigrants in the mining towns of the Choctaw Nation, and, later, Oklahoma. It focuses on Syrian positions and practices related to capitalism. Federally unregulated and operated by radically laissez-faire capitalists, the Choctaw mines constituted “the most dangerous mines in America.” Initially, company camps and towns lacked amenities and services except for exploitative company stores. Partly due to these Gilded Age conditions, by the second decade of the 1900s, eastern Oklahoma mining towns were known for their organized socialist politics. Situated within these tensions, Syrian merchants articulated and demonstrated a range of political economic values and ideas. After their arrival “broke” the hold of the company stores, Syrians built interethnic alliances to help form some of Oklahoma’s earliest commercial clubs and chambers of commerce; public services, such as fire departments; cooperative utilities, including cotton gins; and unions of merchants. With other townspeople, recent immigrants as well as established Anglo-Americans, Syrians helped develop the “company towns” in Choctaw Nation into places that served grassroots entrepreneurial and human interests.

“Sociedad Libanesa” demonstrates that Cuban laws and legal culture, specifically in regard to religion, gender, and family, shaped how Lebanese and Syrian migrants interacted with native Cubans and integrated into the island’s socio-racial tapestry. In the early twentieth-century, Cuba, Lebanon, and Syria underwent concurrent but incomplete transitions to independence that mixed strong nationalist identities and dependence. This paper will investigate the legal cultures and behaviors through the associational life of mahjaris in mid-twentieth-century Cuba and the ways these dynamics influenced the development of transnational and diasporic identities. When they arrived, Lebanese and Syrian migrants in Cuba emphasized their similarities with Cubans as transitional subjects in shifting colonial regimes and capitalized on their religious proximity to Cuban Catholics through displays of civic virtue, participation in associational life, and intermarriage with mostly white Cubans. In doing so, they asserted their whiteness and cubanidad (Cubanness) amidst large populations of Chinese contracted laborers and recently freed slaves of African descent. Yet, crucially, they also maintained distinct cultural practices and diasporic networks with compatriots in the Levant and abroad. Law and legal processes managed this dual process of semi-belonging; Cuban legal frameworks for associational life, citizenship, and immigration—many dating back to Cuba’s colonial period—accommodated transnational identities and, for a few privileged migrants, permitted national belonging and whiteness to coexist with other identities.