Palestinians in the diaspora have migrated in waves during major political events in the history of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Such migration required that Palestinian women leave the familiarity of the Palestinian territories to the unfamiliar in the diaspora. Given the difference in the ease of accessibility and movement within the diaspora, many Palestinians struggled with their sense of reality and what it means to be a Palestinian woman outside of the colonial experience. For them, movement through checkpoints and the exponential threat they faced as females in a violent landscape became their own internalized normal; while the ease of movement, space, and transportation in the diaspora and its decreased sense of gender violence was abnormal. In this chapter, I explore the effects of Israeli policies of closure and separation on the experience and self-perception of identity and reality for Palestinian women in the diaspora. To explore this conundrum of self-perception of one’s human landscape within a colonial setting and outside of it; I interview 20 Palestinian women from the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza Strip who migrated to the United States between the years of 1970 through 2019 to transcribe their lived experiences within the colonial settler state. Their interviews shed light on the human landscape developed within the self-perception of Palestinian women given their experience living under occupation in the colonial settler landscape of the Palestinian territories. They also assist in understanding the ever-changing spatial parameters and rules of contemporary forms of colonial power on the experience of women in the Middle East. Here I rely primarily on an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the colonial settler studies with feminist theory and its relation to the Palestinian female experience.

Migration, Diaspora, and Narratives of Belonging: the Case of the Coptic Orthodox Communities in Europe In the 1950s and 1960s, Egyptian Copts started to immigrate to North America, Australia, Europe, and the Arab Gulf countries. In their new host countries, many Coptic believers gathered into communities and established church parishes in order to continue to practice their religion and ensure the continuity of Coptic Orthodox traditions from Egypt. Such spaces have also served recent Coptic immigrants to connect with other Coptic migrants helping to relieve a sense of ‘uprootedness’ and to evoke the feeling of a ‘home away from home.’ Today, the largest Coptic Orthodox communities outside Egypt are those in English-speaking countries, mainly in the USA and Canada. Accordingly, those communities are well-known both within the transnational Coptic Church and among scholars of Coptic diasporas. By contrast, the communities settled in different European countries, smaller in their size and younger in their existence, are usually overlooked among researchers. Little is known about their histories, activities, and current communal developments. This article takes three European Coptic communities as its focus, specifically those in the Netherlands, Spain, and Milan, Italy. It seeks to explore how migration and particular environments of the new host countries have influenced and shaped the self-image and senses of belonging among members of the three communities. Relying on the ethnographic fieldwork conducted between the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, and Egypt between 2020 and 2023 and the close reading of various types of texts and books published and used by the Coptic churches in those countries, the author intends to illustrate common patterns in the ways these churches shape their narratives and discourses of belonging centered around migratory experience, links to Egypt, and their ‘diaspora’ status. More broadly, the study reflects on the specificities of Coptic migratory developments within larger Egyptian migration waves and aims to ask if and how migrant Copts can be considered as part of broader Egyptian diasporas. Ultimately, the paper aims to fill the lacuna in the study of Egyptian and, more specifically, Coptic migrations by placing European Coptic diasporas into the discussion and to underline the importance of studying these diasporas as part of a larger Egyptian/Coptic transnational community.

Within the U.S. Southwest, there are long-standing Syrian communities that, for generations, have evolved in isolation of the larger Arab diasporic social and cultural networks. These communities began to form in the late nineteenth century when peoples of what was then the province of Greater Syria sought to escape conflict and the conditions of the Ottoman Empire and left their homeland in search of greater economic opportunities in the Americas. Many entered the U.S. from the border crossing in El Paso, Texas, following the encouragement from steamship agents who urged them to travel through Mexico to avoid waiting for passage to New York. Furthermore, Mexico-U.S. border crossings provided an alternative route for those who failed the mandatory health inspection at Ellis Island and other checkpoints. Multiple forms of corruption and medical extortion rings made border crossing from Mexico into the U.S. a viable, but costly and traumatic option for Syrian migrants. Syrians who entered the U.S. from Mexico encountered intense racism and accusations of anarchist conspiracies by border agents. The border offered a backdrop of fear, surveillance, and violence that, as Gloria Anzaldua testifies, becomes so internalized by those who inhabit the borderlands, that individuals struggle to grasp a sense of self identity and communal belonging. Once in the U.S., many continued to settle in the rapidly growing Middle Eastern community in Los Angeles, while others remained in border cities and formed smaller, and less visible, communities throughout the Southwest. Members of these communities today boast of the ways that assimilation efforts and contributions to local civic development have led to economic, and therefore overall, success. However, the migrant experience, precarious border atmosphere, and prevalent racist attitudes produced psychic and cultural traumas that have impacted generations of Syrian-Americans and their individual and communal identities in numerous ways. This talk explores how music has played an instrumental role in the ways that members of these communities sought to strengthen or reject communal ties, traces of family migration stories, and proximities to Arabness. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and archival research, I engage with the work of Sarah M.A Gualtieri and Hani Bawardi, and interrogate the Anaesthetic Self Effect (Joerg Fingerhut, et al.) model and the concept of Musical Identities (David J. Hargreaves, et al.) as a means of understanding how the U.S.-Mexico borderland conflict has impacted the diasporic imaginary of Syrian American communities in the region, resulting in often-fraught views of identity.

The proposed paper analyzes the role of parent-child and intergenerational dynamics in conversion from Islam to Christianity among Kabyle immigrants in a diasporic church community who migrated from Algeria to France, and now form a cohort of converts in their community. The focus is on several cases and examples of narratives/accounts relating how generational experiences and relations with parents and wider political processes and structures in Algeria affected individual agency in decisions to convert. Data are based on this social/cultural anthropologist’s field research in and around Paris, France between 2009 and 2019. More broadly, the essay argues for the value of, but also critically engages insights from the following sets of literature: theories of intergenerational relationships; of religious conversion; diaspora cultures, and specifically, the historical and ethnographic background of Kabyles, who speak an Amazigh/Berber language and who have migrated from Algeria to France over several generations. In their testimonies and life histories, the current generation of immigrants who have recently converted to Christianity often evoke memories of relationships with older cohorts such as parents, as well as experiences of ancestors earlier on. The paper asks, what makes the convert cohort distinct in experience from their parents and earlier ancestor cohorts, but also, what experiences are held in common across generations, and how have these experiences shaped intergenerational relationships and impacted religious conversion among the diasporic converts? The paper argues that an emphasis on the politics of cultural intimacy and everyday life, informed by insights from interdisciplinary works as well as social/cultural anthropology, sheds light on generations, globalization, and conversion. Useful here is Karl Mannheim (1952)’s concept of generations formed through a common location in historical time such that there are shared events and experiences, and on an awareness of that historical location, as well as Cole and Durham’s (2006) insight that age cohorts are not strictly discrete, literal groups, but also constitute perspectives situated in wider social and historical events. Studies of religious and cultural encounters reveal processes of neither harmonious continuity nor complete rupture in conversion (Keane 2007; McIntosh 2009; Robbins 2007), and the findings of the field research presented here suggest that in immigrant converts’ memories, both harmonious inspiration and contentious conflict entered into decisions to convert.

The existing studies on sectarianism in the Middle East have heavily contextualized it as geopolitics with a focus on the Sunni-Shia divide. They have emphasized the significant roles of political elites in changing political circumstances and indicated that political actors play a crucial role in determining sectarian dynamics. Such concentration often narrowly associates sectarianism with tensions, conflicts, and violence, along with its relation to the process of expanding political influence through competition in the Middle East based on sectarian differences. Consequently, there is a limited understanding of how these sectarian orders influence the interactions among ordinary people along religious lines. This study on living sectarianism examines how contemporary Christians in Egypt, in the aftermath of the Arab Uprisings in 2011, negotiate their religious identity by applying the two major theoretical and analytical lenses of lived religion and intersectionality. Lived religion allows us to view people’s religious narratives and practices beyond their institutional walls. Intersectionality helps us see more inclusive ways of how power and privilege operate in society and how the existing social order is being reproduced. Shifting attention from political elites to lay Coptic Orthodox Christians, this theoretical paper broadens the focus to lived and dynamic aspects of the ways that religious minorities negotiate their identity in everyday life. I define living sectarianism as meaning-making processes through daily interactions among ethnic and religious communities. Using examples from my ethnographic research conducted in Cairo and comprising over 50 in-depth interviews with Coptic Christians, this study explores how these individuals make sense of their inter-sectarian relations with their Muslim counterparts, examining variations influenced by social class, gender, and geography.