Following the Holocaust in Europe, the decolonization of Africa, and the rise of Arab nationalism and religious anti-Judaism, there was a substantial wave of Jewish emigration from Morocco to North America, Europe, and Israel. The Six-Day War, the Cold War, and the Yom Kippur War are some of the important events that marked the subsequent years. It is this time interval—the 1950s to 1970s—which constituted the bulk of Jewish immigration to the places mentioned above from Morocco and Turkey. How do those Jews remember life back then and inform different majority-minority relations in Morocco and Turkey? Turkey’s Ottoman history and its majority-minority relations put the country in a unique position compared to the colonial history of Morocco and its relation to its minorities. In 1956, Morocco declared its independence that ended French colonialism, and led to the increase of Arab nationalism in the region. Turkey became an independent state after the collapse of the Ottoman empire in the early 20s long before Morocco. Linguistic assimilation was the policy expected by the Turkish state for equal citizenship of its minorities. Not only Jews but also other minorities including Armenians, Kurdish, Greek, or Circassian had to abandon their language in favor of Turkish. In this presentation, I aim to look at the impact of Arab and Turkish nationalism on the participants through memory. Based on the oral history method, it focuses on 15 individuals from immigrant backgrounds who now reside in Canada. The comparison of their memories allows for an in-depth examination of the complexity of their experiences in two countries before immigration. My paper thus argues that while Moroccan Jews share their stories concerning Arab nationalism and Moroccan colonial history, Turkish Jewish narratives regarding Turkish nationalism remain less salient allowing for a rethinking of state formations of the two countries from the point of the interviewees.

Three events occurred in Palestine-Israel on May 14, 2018. On that day, residents and visitors of Tel Aviv celebrated Israel’s victory in the Eurovision Song Contest at an open-air party; the United States moved its embassy to Jerusalem; and the Israeli military killed 60 and injured over 2700 Palestinians protesting in Gaza. Israel’s dominant visual regime renders these events separate, accidental, and disparate, although they occurred on the same day within a 30-mile radius. In this paper, I analyze the events of May 14, 2018 through the lens of settler innocence. I contend settler innocence obscures how these events are politically entangled and are a result of what happened 70 years prior, on May 14, 1948, which marked the establishment of Israel and the concurrent and ongoing dispossession of Palestinians. Settler innocence is a discursive strategy that disappears signs of Indigenous displacement from the dominant visual field. Innocence produces a deliberate unknowing of the power differentials that allows settlers to deny continuous involvement in systems of domination. I argue that Israel utilizes settler innocence as an organizing principle of space production to disavow responsibility for Palestinian dispossession, justify the military occupation of Palestinian Territories, and derail the project of decolonization.

Scholarship on settler colonialism in Palestine and on Turtle Island highlights parallels between entwined processes of racialization and colonization (Abdulhadi & Olwan, 2015; Barakat, 2018; Mikdashi, 2017; Qutami, 2014; Salaita, 2016; Tabar & Desai, 2017). Such work provides key analytic and conceptual insights, however, it has yet to attend to how such processes are embodied, enacted and performed. My paper addresses questions of embodiment, subjectivity and citizenship for Palestinian, Arab and Muslim youth practicing and performing dabke (Palestinian folk-dancing) in the context of Canada’s 150th confederation anniversary yearlong celebrations. Through a 24-month critical performance ethnography I ask: what does it mean to dance a relationship to one stolen land on another stolen land? I examine the youth’s narratives of belonging to Canada and their relationships to Palestine, learning and performing dabke in Canada. I use critical spatial analysis and theories of cultural production to examine how their somatic experiences interact with cultural representation and self-representation. I argue that the youth’s engagement with dabke is a joyful expression of Palestine that proudly connects them to their land in embodied ways, as an imagined and idealized alternative site of Arab and Muslim subject formation. Nevertheless, the youth performing dabke are situated in settler discourses that shape their spatial imaginaries and practices to embody colonial power. In the end, I conclude that Arab and Muslim racial inequality is shaped by settler colonial relations to space and place. By closely examining embodiment and subject formation in youth on Turtle Island, this paper reorients debates of what it means to belong to settler states as racialized people. It examines how racism unevenly fashions both the structural subject positions available to settlers, and the pedagogical processes of social citizenship that shape their subjectivities. By centering somatic and spatial experiences in my analysis, I unpack how processes of power move through racialized socio-spatial and embodied flows to normalize settler colonial logics for youth subjectivity. Rather than an examination of overt state violence, my focus on disguised forms of state violence orients the field towards violence’s banality in shaping youth subjectivities. Furthermore, as an iconic example of joy, collectivity and relationship to occupied Palestine, dabke can help us understand the relationship between racialized belonging and settler citizenship for other transnational groups in North America living in the heart of states that colonize their homelands.

Literature produced by the refugee gives voice, dignity, and agency to the otherwise dispossessed subject. Not only do the survivors work-through their unsettling experiences by narrating their life stories, they make a demand on their audience to bear witness to atrocities. The refugee narratives such as Behrouz Boochani’s No Friends but the Mountains requalify the space of the camp, propelling it from invisibility to explosive presence in political debates. The subjects no more foreclosed, become political agents endowed with voice and demands. In this essay, I look at the micro and macro dynamics that contribute to the recognition of a refugee memoir including their engagement with politics, aesthetics, and ethics. Key Words: Refugee Literature, Iranian exilic life narratives, Boochani, Nayeri, Neyestani

… And Bid Him Sing is a novel by David Graham Du Bois, published in 1975, through which the author reflects on his experience as an African-American intellectual in self-imposed exile in 1960s Cairo, Egypt. …And Bid Him Sing presents a confluence of harmonious and dissonant modalities of Blackness articulated and (re)defined by shifting political currents beyond the Atlantic. While Egypt, post-Nasser, was undergoing a shift in its political and economic identity, the Black Power movement was also negotiating and rearticulating its political identity, as in the case of the Black Panther Party. From Oakland, California, David Du Bois chronicled different modalities of Blackness through a triadic literary expression using fiction, history, and autobiography to represent and dramatize the Black American lived experience within the confines of imperialism in both the center and the periphery. In this article, I show how David Du Bois sets up the novel as a Black diasporic internationalist discursive formation through which he draws the contours of Egyptian and African-American “diasporan consciousness” using different modes of (discursive) representation (Butler, 2001). The novel is a field where space and memory intersect through different modes of representation. While different modes of translation seem to dominate the novel’s literary discourse (Feldman, 2011), I argue that the novel primarily grapples with issues of representation, including questions of displacement, authenticity, roots and routes, language, class, and race. In this novel the Black lived experience and its future are defined through the memory of African-American story of transnational belonging, centering Cairo––a city aptly known as Al-Qahira or “The Conqueror.” David was the stepson of pioneer Black pan-African intellectual and activist-scholar, W.E.B. Du Bois. His sojourn in Cairo marks a metaphoric return to Africa, a place that “functions as the constituting basis of collective [Black] diasporan identity,” (Butler, 2001). Enabled by Nasser’s commitment to a “revolutionary” decolonial Egypt, David Du Bois came to Cairo in 1961, as an imagined diasporic homeland, followed by his mother Shirley Graham Du Bois in 1967. David Du Bois’s approach brings Nasser’s three circles in close proximity to the Black American gaze and dialectics of Blackness in the diaspora. Whether the motivation for David Du Bois’s love for Egypt was real, desired, or imagined, it centered 1964 Egypt in a way that made Cairo become a “metropole for Black internationalism.” (Alhassen, 2015).