The cataclysmic events of World War I tend to overshadow the regional, and certainly less devastating, Italo-Turkish War pushing this conflict to the margins of our historical memory. Yet, this struggle over seemingly peripheral territories, such as the Dodecanese Islands and Libya, became a heated ideological battleground for the emerging nationalisms of the Mediterranean and deserves more scrutiny. Taking a comparative perspective, my paper delineates the contours of the geographical imaginaries of Italian, Ottoman, Greek, and Arab nationalisms and how participants and pundits of the conflict incorporated these Ottoman territories into their national spaces. Examining the writings and publications of influential nationalist leaders, military participants, and popular media coverage of the war, I trace the trajectories of nationalisms in response to shifting borders and material realities. The paper demonstrates how historically insular and independent territories became the target of a variety of nationalist projects that attempted to homogenize and nationalize these spaces. Further, it illustrates the way in which these territories and the conflict over them shaped and reshaped the national paradigms of the war’s belligerents. Episodes, such as Ottoman commander Enver Pasha’s insistence on establishing and maintaining schools to service the local population in the Ottoman Sancak of Benghazi despite the constant threat of Italian incursions, Ottoman Greeks’ reaction to the Italian occupation of the Dodecanese Islands, or nationalist, and later fascist, ideologue Enrico Corradini’s reconceptualization of the Italian diaspora in North Africa as the building blocks of an incipient national empire, demonstrate the significance of this war in the geographic imaginaries of Mediterranean nationalisms responding to European colonialism, the hardening of borders, and the emergence of a world system of nation-states.

In “One Wall, Two Seas”, a novella set in Tangier, Driss Ksikes, a Moroccan journalist—who is also a novelist, playwright, and activist—writes: “Inevitably, to cap it all, history stutters on a daily basis”. Referring to the recurrent aspirations of many Moroccans of crossing the Strait of Gibraltar, Ksikes evokes a sense of “historical stuttering”, what might be understood as a non-linear interpretation of history, a history marked by gaps, holes, and absence. This paper examines various artistic iterations of “historical stuttering” through the works of visual artists, Kader Attia and Yto Barrada, both of whom draw their creativity from a fractured Mediterranean consciousness. Both rely on multiple mediums, their work using overlapping techniques of painting, photography, writing, music and installation, effectively bringing to light those very breaks and silences in contemporary historical narratives of the Mediterranean. I examine the ways in which Attia and Barrada confront current emigration in the Mediterranean- a Russian roulette modality of risking it all- that is, I suggest, powered by images and driven by symbols. I explore the agonistic role of visual arts in a distinct geographical space and specific historical time; that is the conjuncture of contemporary Maghrebi-Mediterranean crossings and their images. To try to capture the historical moment of emigration in today’s current context is often to reduce a highly complicated set of conditions to an image, and insodoing divests it of the plurality of contexts in which it is generated. The emigrating subject lives in a state of manipulation, driven by the lure of the simulacrum, by the idea of a place that is only partially “real” if it is real at all, an Eldorado, as it is now ubiquitously termed. Through their multimedial works Attia and Barrada call into question the extreme disconnect between viewer and image, waging a powerful critique of the abstraction of the real that pervades today’s representation of emigration in the Mediterranean. Their works stutter, shock and interrupt those histories that are regularly transformed into internet memes of drowned refugees and Instagram trophies. The viewer, an ‘embodied spectator’ (Marks), is driven to fill in what lies in those empty spaces, in those gaps which highlight both our inability to see and the aporetic nature of representation itself. Ultimately, Attia and Barrada’s palimpsestic approaches form a ‘migratory aesthetics’ (Bal) that signal the necessity of a multidisciplinary interpretive framework when dealing with the contemporary Mediterranean.

In 1955 the French government launched an unprecedented, but little-known legal battle against the state of Israel to protect 15,000 hectares of hilly farmland located in the town of ‘Ayn Karim that the Israeli government had expropriated to build a new medical school for the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The land in question, however, technically fell under the purview of the Government General of French Algeria: it was part of a waqf established in the fourteenth century by the grandson of the Algerian Sufi mystic Abū Madyan Shuʻayb Al-Ansari Telimçani, the revenue from which went to establish a number charitable institutions in Jerusalem’s Mughrabi Quarter. Following the French invasion of Algeria in 1830, France became the custodian of all inalienable Islamic endowments associated with Algeria, including the Abū Madyan waqf in Palestine. Thus, in an ironic turn of historical circumstances, when that property came under the threat of seizure France was able to initiate legal proceedings on behalf of its Muslim subjects in North Africa to protect a religious land grant located 1,9000 miles away in another country. Moreover, the very same case pursued by France against Israel would be legally transferred to a newly independent Algerian state following its accession to nationhood in July 1962, consequently giving an Arab country that openly supported the Palestinian cause a direct claim over territory in Israel estimated at several billion francs. Using newly accessible primary sources located in French diplomatic archives, this paper will explore the circumstances surrounding the French—and later Algerian—claims to the Abū Madyan waqf in ‘Ayn Karim. It will also chart the evolution of the court case within the wider context of French decolonization by analyzing the reasoning used by both French policymakers and Algerian Muslim notables to protect French Algerian property interests in Israel despite the outbreak of the Algerian War of Independence in 1954. Lastly, it will investigate the ultimate fate of the land claim once Algeria became independent in 1962 and address the lingering connections of colonial disentanglement that often do not fit neatly into the common narrative of the “end of empire.” It is hoped that this paper will contribute to a broadened understanding of how the processes of decolonization extend beyond the traditional binary of colonizer/colonized and highlight the often unintended consequences of imperial withdrawal.

MESA Conference Abstract The Death of David Altaras: Identity and Plurality at the Crossroads of the Mediterranean. In a letter to the Cinque Savii, (the Venetian board of trade), written on April 15th 1774, the Venetian Consul informs the members of the death of David Altaras, the head of the Jewish Altaras clan, and the strange circumstances that followed his death. Directly after the passing of Altaras, both the Venetian consul and the Ottoman Qadi turned up at the house to place a seal on the door, claiming the deceased as one of their own. This tug of war between the two sides dragged on for a long time, while the body was left to decompose in a sealed house. It wasn’t until after four European consuls, in a rare show of solidarity, came together to petition, that the Qadi gave way under pressure and allowed the body to be buried without paying the required taxes. The Altaras clan exemplify the Levantine families who straddled the divide between the Ottoman and European worlds, and rose to commercial power in the second half of the eighteenth century as a result of a change in commerce and market patterns. Identity in the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period was fairly fluid and opportunistic. Members of the Levantine community were long-standing inhabitants of the empire who had lived there over an extended period of time, and as such, considered themselves subjects of the sultan. However, many of them simultaneously retained their European identities, which was Venetian in the case of the Altaras. By the nineteenth century, the Levantine identity meant being part of a growing commercial bourgeoisie, cultural go-betweens, dragomans, and even consuls or representatives of European nations. By examining the letter announcing the death of Altaras and other such correspondence from the Venetian state archives, this paper will demonstrate the ambivalent approach the Levantines took towards their hybridity using their dual identities to leverage trade and further their ambitions. This paper will argue that they were able to do this by availing themselves of the dual legal systems provided to them by both the Europeans and the Ottoman authorities and using them both to their advantage.