Umam Documentation and Research houses the bulk of its documents chronicling the history of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990) in Villa Slim, one of the last remaining historic mansions in the Southern Suburbs of Beirut. Efforts to remake this house as the physical base for this archive, devoted to preserving memories of the war in order to highlight alternative interpretations of the conflict’s history, dovetail with the way the organization employs nostalgia and stories of the space to figuratively [re]create what is presented as a secular, more inclusive identity in the present. The house seems to invite an imaginative engagement with the past as a space apart from the dominating social milieu of Al-Dahiyeh (Arabic for “suburbs”), which is often described as home to “Hezbollah’s stronghold,” as well as the majority of greater Beirut’s Shi’a population. The area is largely identified with this particular sectarian profile, much like how accounts of what happened during the civil war break down along sectarian lines, as there is no official state narrative. To those involved with Umam D&R, Villa Slim represents a different sort of place: one where memory “flashes up,” giving a glimpse of the numerous futures that could be. More than longing for a bygone Lebanon devoid of sectarianism, this nostalgia creates a way of feeling the past in the present that opens the possibility of resisting totalizing narratives both of national history and of place. This paper will address the way that the everyday experience of working in the archive constitutes place and history in post-war Lebanon. A descriptive analysis of Villa Slim itself and an ethnographic engagement with the tales told about it by the organization’s founders and staff will show how place-based nostalgia is inscribed and reimagined in the organization’s approach to memory and the civil war. The portrayal of the house as historically unique in these stories is part of a process of remembering that reimagines Villa Slim’s role in the present, much as the archive reimagines history in contemporary Lebanon to include disparate accounts of the past.

Thinking of Palestine as an archive is one way to reflect on the conditions that inform the political economy of knowledge and power. In this political economy, in the case of Palestine and far beyond, access to capital is profoundly differentiated. This capital, this power, often takes shape in a spectral form: the ghost of objectivity. Who gets to claim the vaunted category of the objective? What does it mean to be “biased”? It is this political economy of objectivity, of who gets to teach, think, archive Palestine that is at the core of our present. It is not coincidental that every Israeli invasion or attack on Palestine and/or Palestinians since 1948 has targeted a Palestinian archive. The story of Khalil Sakakini’s daughters as they entered the Hebrew University library in Jerusalem just after 1967 to find their father’s books, with his handwriting on the margins organized neatly on a shelf, is one example of many. The Israeli targeting of Palestinian archives is a state of siege, the evidence should anyone still need it, of an ongoing settler colonial enterprise. But the targeting and confiscation of archives work in multiple other ways. They constrain who has what academic freedom to tell which histories. The shards of the colonized archive in their locations in Israeli institutions and libraries are the very material conditions that determine who narrates the past, who writes history, and who gets to don the warm robes of objectivity. Banishing the ghosts of surveillance, objectivity, and prohibited speech requires a vigilant attention to the realities of settler colonialism in Palestine, not least of which are the material conditions (and impossibilities) of writing, teaching, and archiving history. This paper ponders how the dispersion of a Palestinian archive, and its immersion in various Israeli and British archival spaces, works. While the process of dispersal and dispossession is a violent, the reality of decentralized archives can work to offer new questions. In addition, various collectives take shape to forge their own archival collections that can transcend institutional constraints. By analyzing how historical accumulation works and the multiple ways archives can take shape, I explore and questions experiences of national memory and commemoration.

This paper will reflect on the use of the Israeli archives for writing the social history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Like all national archives, Israel’s state and military archives are bound up with the history of the state which houses its collections, not only in terms of categories used to organize records, but also in terms of what is open to the public and what remains sealed. Relative to its neighboring counterparts in the Arab world, the archives in Israel offer a tremendously rich and well-organized treasure trove of material on the twentieth century, especially since 1945. But relative to Western democracies that Israel likes to compare itself to—and to a certain extent despite its own laws—a large portion of Israel’s records remained sealed or heavily redacted. Nowhere is this evidentiary paradox more stark and politically consequential than in material related to the question of Palestine—starting with the expulsion and flight of roughly 80 percent of the Palestinian Arabs from the territory that became Israel, the subordination of the small minority of Palestinians who remained through the formal military regime that Israel imposed on them until 1966, and Israel’s ongoing occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip since 1967. It is critical to point out some of the empirical and ethical problems raised here. First, a significant amount of material is still sealed—and has been resealed in recent years. Second, Palestinian students and researchers in the Occupied Territories cannot enter Israel without a permit that is nearly impossible to obtain. Finally, Palestinian refugees outside the Occupied Territories cannot enter Israel at all for research purposes unless they carry a passport from outside of the Middle East. The question of access matters a great deal because Israel continues to hold more written Palestinian records than any single Palestinian research institution. The reason for this goes back to the birth of the state itself, when Israel destroyed and/or confiscated Palestinian public and private libraries, printing presses, publishing houses and more. This process continued in Gaza in 1956, the West Bank in 1967, Lebanon in 1982, and East Jerusalem in 2001. After discussing the question of access as it pertains to people, I will spend the rest of my time analyzing the legal framework of declassification in Israel and how a number of scholars have challenged the archives to open up documents previously denied to them.

In “The Archive Question,” I examine how the Saudi modern has been imagined and reproduced through material practices: from acts of political commemoration and archeological renovations, to the production of mobile history exhibits and the national archive(s). I approach the political contours of practices of commemoration and its necessary complement, “creative destruction,” such as the production of archives, exhibits, and urban redevelopment plans, as a particular aspect of practices of history making, economic diversification and the reorganization of modern power. What power relations do Saudi archives and sites of commemoration embody? What does the spectacle of cultural productions, such as the archive, the museum, or the city, perform? How do we discern the political socialities inherent in such projects of recollection and commemoration? Examining these various archives as subjects allows me to address them as sites where other histories are suppressed and can be resuscitated. More importantly, however, addressing archival projects through theories of materiality, coupled with those of the archive, allow me to open up questions about the social production of historical knowledge and their embodiments in lived space. Throughout the paper, I focus on several state and private archives, exhibitions, and archeological sites in Saudi Arabia to discern the politics of archiving and spatial transformation to the project of writing history and state formation.