This paper examines the discursive representation of deafness and its relation to individual and collective re-membering in Kader Abdolah’s novel My Father’s Notebook (2000). The book is one of the first Iranian diaspora novels in which the story revolves around a protagonist with a disability. The book starts at the end of the Qajar dynasty with the birth of the deaf protagonist, Agha Akbar, and follows the life of Akbar and his family in the fictional village of Sanjan and later in Isfahan, Tehran, and the Netherlands. The book ends with Agha Akbar’s son, Ismael, who is now living in the Netherlands. Akbar’s life is entangled with Iran’s contemporary history, from the coronation of the first Pahlavi King (1926) to the end of the Iran-Iraq War (1980-1988) and the lives of the Iranian diaspora in the West after the Islamic Revolution (1979) and the War. The book challenges historical ableism and the history of ableism in modern Iran by narrating the events from the deaf protagonist’s point of view. Akbar is only able to communicate with a “makeshift” sign language with his hearing family members. He is also illiterate, and to make up for this, he “invents” a writing system like Cuneiform and writes about his life and his environment in a notebook he later gives to his son. The hearing son, or the coda, not only relates to the other family members and the readers what his father communicates in sign language but also attempts to decipher the enigmatic notebook. Despite the book’s fresh point of view about disability that distinguishes it from other contemporary fictional productions, this paper argues that it reduces the disabled body to a metaphor to critique Iran's contemporary sociopolitical condition. The deaf protagonist, in other words, turns into a "narrative prosthesis" and a device of characterization. Building upon David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder’s theorization on the pervasive use of disabled bodies in literature as a device for "fixing" and "normalizing" what is "aberrant," this article expounds that Abdolah's book does not take into consideration the materiality of deafness and its relation to the ableism embedded in historical narratives.

My work on family papers has brought me to learn and write about a tumultuous period between 1860 and 1920 in Urumia Persia. As an academic teacher and researcher focussing on social and political change in Africa I chose not to learn about my own family history even though I knew it raised issues of end of empire and Western influence that I cared about. My mother was born in Urumia, Persia and her father and grandfather were missionaries there, but somehow I did not want to give thought and feeling to their lives and experiences. I feared measuring myself against my forebears. But the enthusiasm of an Iranian-born amateur historian and the discovery of revealing family papers that included two unpublished book manuscripts written by William Ambrose Shedd, who died in Persia in 1918, brought me to engage with the life and work of my missionary grandparents. The experience of this kind of historical engagement is the topic of this paper. I knew that William Ambrose Shedd, my mother’s father was seen as a martyr and a hero in the American Christian missionary field. The family papers revealed that he was also author of a biography of his father and also a thorough first-person account of the crisis in the mission and the region in the year 1915. I helped edit and get published the biography and continue to work on the editing and publication of the book about 1915. I discuss how my study of this very specific historical place and time allowed or forced me to gain a much deeper understanding of what my family means and to sort out my thoughts and feelings about the missionary enterprise. I learned to think in a more objective historian-like way and to discover how my family history fits into the vast story of modernizing change that engulfed the world between 1860 and 1920. I discovered that missionary documents were a rich source of historical information that had to be looked at together with other sources, especially accounts from the people living in the region. I learned to see Urumia, Persia as a particularly revealing microcosm of social transformation, to understand the roles of my forebears without having to identify with all their beliefs and purposes, and to appreciate the moral and political complexity of the dramatic social and cultural changes the Azerbaijan region of Persia in these years.

In his famous 1984 article “Permission to Narrate,” Edward Said condemned the systems of propaganda and censorship that erased the narratives of Palestinian people, denying their existence as a people and dehumanizing them. 40 years later as Israeli bombardment in Gaza continues, the erasure and dehumanization of Palestinians is even more evident. In response, Palestinian scholars, writers, performers, artists, and activists have resisted by sharing their stories via multiple media and techniques. As practices acutely engaged with narrative, oral history and storytelling have already been the subject of significant ethnographic research for their role in sustaining Palestinian communal memory, sense of identity, and calls for justice. This literature on Palestinian “memory-work” addresses the content, narrative style, and affective and political impact of these stories (Abu-Lughod & Sa’di 2007, 3; Salih 2017; Sayigh 2007, 2020). However, in much of this analysis the vehicle of storytelling – the voice – is overlooked. Oral storytellers engage their voices to bear witness to a particular event, to communicate information, and to express an inner world; but the voice is also a material phenomenon, wrapped up in the somatic and the sensorial, the vibrant movements of the body. I argue that when a storyteller speaks in their own voice, they bear witness to the story’s events with a visceral intimacy that can sensitize listeners to the storyteller’s felt experiences, building a foundation for deep communal connection and solidarity. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank during the spring of 2023, this paper will place Palestine Studies, voice studies (Cavarero in Sterne 2012, LaBelle 2014), affect studies (Stewart 2010), and feminist literature (Hamzeh et. al. 2020, Minh-Ha 1989) in conversation to analyze the vocal practices of contemporary Palestinian oral storytellers in their live performances. I examine one performance by a student storyteller telling a personal story to family and friends at a showcase event to demonstrate how the timbre and corporeality of a storyteller’s voice contributes to the impact of the tale. This paper contributes to understandings of Palestinian oral history and storytelling by advocating for the embodied aspects of the voice as quintessential to the power of Palestinian storytelling as a witnessing practice.

Over the last forty-six years of conducting field research in a southwestern Iranian (former) village, the proposing author has become aware of how lacking in visibility have been those persons who provided so much information, analysis, support, and friendship to the western anthropologist who came to live in their community. Of course, I thanked them in publications, quote them (using pseudonyms), give out numerous photographs, and try to maintain contact and friendship with them. In the past, however, conference papers, articles, and my book have named me alone as author. Iranians—mainly from my village research site of “Aliabad,” but also others--have collaborated with me in the anthropological endeavor, but only I have received the credit for authorship. Only in the last few years have I thought to sign off on papers and articles with joint authorship. Suggested to me by a long-time friend from Aliabad, who mentioned she would like to write a book about her life, I have also begun taking down life-histories/memoirs of my long- time friends and collaborators from Aliabad. This approach may be partly due to my lack of access to presence in my fieldwork site; the last time I was able to get to Iran was in May 2018. Instead of “participant observation” in the community, among many people, research has been limited to phone calls, internet communication with whatsapp and meet, and visits with one or a few people from Aliabad who came to Turkey. This limitation promotes long interviews/narrations with individuals. I have presented several conference papers with the narrator as first author (using pseudonyms) and myself as second author. One friend spent a month with me in Istanbul telling me the story of her life in Persian as I typed in English. We have since spoken many times as questions arise. We hope to publish this book. Two other chapter-length manuscripts have resulted from working with others about their lives; I hope to continue work taking down narrations to develop a volume of chapter-length memoirs for publication. Although authors are indicated with pseudonyms only, they know they have provided their narrations about their lives and times for conference presentations and publications. Hopefully, acknowledging local people as authors examining their lives within the social history of their environment constitutes a step toward minimizing intellectual colonialism and crediting local research partners for their indispensable contributions to the anthropological enterprise.

How does a traumatic event that transforms a minoritarian community’s political life gain new lives in theater? How do such theater productions become a site for social and historical justice efforts? Combining ethnographic and archival research, my presentation will explore these questions by focusing on the Alevi religious minority in Turkey and the Sivas Massacre of 1993. I will examine how these productions mobilize affect by immersing the audience in the collective traumatic experience, and encourage them to become agents of change in the present. The community collectively referred to as “Alevis” makes up the largest religious minority in Turkey. After the Sunni Muslim Ottoman rulers asserted caliphal authority in the early sixteenth century, the Alevi minority was marked as the enemies within. In 1923, the Republic of Turkey was founded as a secular nation-state. Nevertheless, the Alevi community’s experiences of citizenship and belonging remained precarious. The nation-state marginalized Alevis through incursions into their rituals, insinuations of heresy, and permission to societal violence targeting the community. The regime thus endeavored to assimilate Alevis into the normative Sunni Muslim and Turkish national identity. The waves of migration beginning in the 1950s gradually resulted in the urbanization and transnationalization of the Alevi community. As they settled in urban centers in Turkey and across Europe, theater became a site where Alevi people explored their everyday experiences of oppression and discrimination. This cultural expression was dramatically underscored by the events of July 1993, when thirty-three people died in a mob arson conducted by radical Sunni Islamists at a hotel accommodating attendees of an Alevi cultural gathering in the city of Sivas. Authorities declared that the incident was not a deliberate attack against Alevis. Despite numerous trials, no one was held accountable. While this was not the first instance of violence against the community, it fundamentally transformed their political life. Alevis, who had largely maintained a discreet stance and refrained from voicing their demands, began to openly assert their identities and advocate for the recognition of their beliefs through their international networks. Theater and performance played a central role in this period of transformation. The performances facilitated political struggle while transmitting and transforming the community’s historical traumas. The case of Alevi theater demonstrates how minoritarian theater practices facilitate the constitution of postmemory and the intergenerational transmission and transformation of trauma during times of sociopolitical transformation, and how these dynamics serve the struggle for social and historical justice.