Intercultural Mobilities in Central and West Asian Contexts

As Noel B. Salazar (2018: 153) suggests,

Mobility is all-pervading as a metaphor for the contemporary world, both in its physical forms and its imaginative implications. Mobility may well have become the key difference- and otherness-producing machine of our age, involving significant inequalities of speed, risk, rights, and status (Heyman and Campbell 2009), with both “movers” and “stayers” being engaged in the construction of complex politics of fixity and movement (Salazar and Smart 2011).

Salazar made these observations shortly before mobilities around the world were disrupted by COVID-19, but the differences and otherness he observes have arguably intensified with the effects of the pandemic. This is perhaps particularly true in Central and West Asia, a region disproportionately afflicted with compulsions and painful reasons to ‘move’ or ‘stay’, with unfulfilled – or, in some cases, partially fulfilled – hopes for movement in the ways the future is imagined and in power relations, and with extended separations from loved ones, especially those living in diaspora. Mobilities – physical and metaphorical, remembered, lived and imagined – emerged as a key theme of the second international Central and West Asia and Diasporas Research Network (CWADRN) conference, hosted by Humboldt University in Berlin in 2018. The broad range of im/mobilities addressed by speakers at the conference reflected the ‘significant inequalities’, in Salazar’s words, experienced by people living with the ongoing effects of colonial and military histories, as well as related orientalist narratives and imaginaries (see Shahvisi 2021). This special issue presents a selection of articles developed from some of the papers presented at the conference, which draw from various disciplines, including cultural studies, literary studies, sociology, politics, migration and gender studies.

Friederike Ziegler and Tim Schwanen (2011: 758) conceptualise mobility as ‘the overcoming of any type of distance between a here and a there, which can be situated in physical, electronic, social, psychological or other kinds of space’. Maria Paradiso (2016: 105) links mobility with the intercultural in her account of ‘contemporary geographies of the Mediterranean’, which she describes as ‘created not only by the media, powers and ideologies, but also by everyday people’s inter-ethnic, inter-cultural, and emotional interactions in places and digital communication channels. Such interactions are often characterised by blockages of inter-ethnic or inter-cultural exchanges, as well as by inequalities.’ Blockages and inequalities are recurring, if not constant, obstacles to the kinds of mobility, including intercultural communication, collaboration, hospitality and reconciliation, that contributors to this special issue represent as desirable. However, mobility is, of course, not intrinsically or always desirable, especially the forms of mobility imposed on people who are compelled to flee their homes. Likewise, as Katerina Rozakou (2020: 24) observes, ‘[a]cceleration is not equated with liberation and emancipation, just as waiting is not de facto a state of inactivity and passivity’. Rozakou makes this observation in the context of her analysis of ‘temporal regimes of power’ (2020: 23) in ‘the long summer of migration’ (Kasparek and Speer 2015), when large numbers of people moved from Central and West Asia to Europe.

The Mediterranean Sea forms the western boundary of the Central and West Asian region. It has played a crucial role – as a hazardous physical obstacle, a passageway and a symbol – in the movement of people from the region to Europe and other parts of the world (see Holman 2021 on ‘seeking refuge in Fortress Europe’, Pearlman 2021 on displaced Syrians’ reflections on dignity, Drangsland 2020; Eriksen 2020; Rozakou 2020). The experiences of people who had crossed the Mediterranean was one focus of the 2018 CWADRN conference, especially as it was held in Berlin, home to many of those people. Another focus was the lives of those who had moved from one part of the Central and West Asian region to another (see Şenses and Farahani 2021 on ‘hospitality’ in Istanbul, Türkyılmaz 2020 on the history of Ezidi forced migration and displacement, Afifi et al. 2019 on Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, Mirzoev and Stephan-Emmrich 2018 on Tajik ‘middlemen’ in Dubai, Tober 2007; Olszewska 2015; Naseh et al. 2018 on refugees from Afghanistan in Iran, Al-Hardan 2016 on Palestinians in Syria and Eldemerdash 2015 on stateless peoples in Kuwait). Each of these movements entails a new set of intercultural encounters, ranging from the brutal and tragic to the hospitable and collaborative. Of course, people have also moved from the region to most other parts of the world, including North America (see Kaida et al. 2020 on refugees in Canada), East Asia (Kim 2020) and Australasia (Boochani 2018; Rangi 2019). This context of mobility and encounter, often accompanied by extremes of inequality, forms a backdrop to this special issue.

As elsewhere, the Central and West Asian region has seen considerable change since 2018. Many areas have seen devastation and extreme loss of life. The United States, which has shaped political shifts across the region for decades, withdrew its military support for the Kurdish population in north-eastern Syria in 2019 and withdrew from Afghanistan in 2021. The consequences for local people in both places are dire and ongoing (Akbari 2021). In 2020, Beirut suffered a devastating explosion in its port (Khalili 2020), leaving at least 217 people dead and thousands injured and/or homeless. The effects of the explosion exacerbated Lebanon's health and humanitarian crises. Meanwhile, in 2021, millions of people in Yemen are reportedly at risk of starvation, as war, famine and COVID-19 continue, with little world attention (Ambrose 2021). These are just a few examples of the broader context, which, while beyond the scope of our special issue, is important to remember as we turn to the contributors’ areas of focus.

In the face of such tragedy, it can sometimes feel inadequate to focus on the details of interpersonal relationships, literature, or the arts. However, as the contributors to this special issue demonstrate, it is often precisely in such a focus – rather than (or alongside) statistics and dates – that we can approach an understanding of the imaginaries and histories that have shaped today’s world and the possibilities for future relations and productive im/mobilities. Each contributor presents a new and nuanced approach to an account of im/mobility that brings together past, present and future. As each article focuses on specific encounters and relations - in and beyond Palestine, Lebanon and Iran, together the authors expand our understanding of the effects of alienation and misrepresentation, as well as the possiblities of sharing knowledge, re-narration, collaboration and, finally, transformation.

In the first article, ‘On Stealing Books and Missing Words’, Adania Shibli considers the context of Palestine in the years before and after the Nakba (Catastrophe), in the aftermath of the 1948 War. Shibli reflects on the manifold relationships between humans, words and books in the context of colonisation and efforts to manage the colonised. The article looks specifically at the effects of holding and sharing knowledge, versus withholding it, as reflected in the process of publishing books, versus stealing them. It goes on to examine the experience of Palestinians’ linguistic alienation as an effect of their experience of settler colonialism in Palestine, weaving between personal experiences, Edward Said’s thoughts on this question of linguistic alienation, and Aimé Césaire’s ideas on silence, among other things.

The second article, Kifah Hanna’s ‘Queerness and the Cosmopolitan’, examines the dialogue on (homo)sexuality discourse in Rashid al-Daif’s and Joachim Helfer’s What Makes a Man? Sex Talk in Beirut and Berlin (2015). Hanna explores this literary production within the framework of cosmopolitanism delineated by Kwame Anthony Appiah, in which he calls for the necessity of dialogue across national and cultural boundaries in order to enhance our understanding of one another’s differences. She reads al-Daif’s and Helfer’s cross-cultural exchange along the lines of negotiating (dis)involvement in the Eurocentric assimilationist project, as identified by Joseph Massad. Hanna proposes an analytic approach to al-Daif’s text within the context of literary agitation. Her analysis attends to the dynamics of defining self in relation to the Other in matters of sexuality and the role of language, translation, and readership. This article suggests that the centrality of gender and (homo)sexuality discourse to the cross-cultural conversation appropriates queerness to local and global readers within humanistic lines of inquiry.

Sary Zananiri’s article, ‘Indigeneity, Transgression and the Body: Orientalism and Biblification in the Popular Imaging of Palestinians’, considers how the representation of Palestinians in popular imaging has shifted from the nineteenth century to the current day. This analysis utilises a mixture of popular media, including photography, portraiture, film, political posters and television. It charts the relationship of Orientalism and Biblification as imaging systems – and their respective connotations of familiarity and otherness – in delineating questions of indigeneity. In doing so, it considers how have operated to effect transformations in the reception of the Palestinian body, both in western and Palestinian authored imagery. This analysis is underscored with questions of class, urban-rural divides and modernity in Palestine. Analysing the continuities, contestation and transformation shaping the imaging of the Palestinian body, this article focuses on the figures of the fellah, the fedayee and the infiltrator. It argues the Palestinian body was transformed from an indigenous, biblified vestige to an orientalised outsider status, with continuing impacts on contemporary representations. It considers how the historical contestation of Palestinian bodies has continued to impact contemporary popular narratives.

The fourth article, Kate Pass’s ‘From Iran to Australia: Intercultural Encounters in Music’, focuses on the experiences of four performing artists, vocalist Tara Tiba, saz player and guitarist Reza Mirzaei, daf and ney player Esfandiar Shahmir and tar player Hamed Sadeghi, who have moved from Iran to Australia, where they now live and work. It traces their respective journeys of migration and career development in their new country. In particular, it explores their collaborations with Australian-born jazz musicians, and how this has affected their music-making. Through a series of informal interviews with these performers, this article examines their lived experience of working as artists in Australia, and how intercultural collaborations have impacted their creative output. It finds that nuanced intercultural approaches have been crucial to the success and the nature of the music they create.

In the fifth article, ‘Fabulation and Fabrication: Constructing the Atlal in Anthony Shadid’s House of Stone’, Arththi Sathananthar examines Anthony Shadid’s memoir House of Stone (2012), which describes Shadid’s return to a rural village in Lebanon and the rebuilding of his ancestral home after it had been left derelict due to the political turmoil of the country’s fifteen-year civil war (1975–1990). This article explores the relationship between memory and ‘home’, and the ways Shadid depicts the ancestral house as a record of a conflation of memories, ranging from the personal to the ancestral and national. Sathananthar argues that Shadid’s project transfers the imaginary construct of home onto the physical site of the ancestral house. The memoir and the house function as sites of fabulation and fabrication. Shadid fabulates rich tales of an idealised Levant, encompassing romantic stories of Marjayoun’s past and the house’s role in his dream of fabricating a Levantine home. House of Stone illustrates the ways personal and national memory may be linked through the physical site of the house. This process of fabulation and fabrication is representative of an imagined collective identity, shared across time by family and nation. The article deconstructs Shadid’s literary representations of physical and imaginary spaces in order to reveal ‘the home’ as a complex site of conflated memories.

Finally, Micaela Sahhar’s article, ‘Re-calculating Reconciliation: On the Transformative Power of Resentment in Israel-Palestinian Relations’, looks to the future as it argues that Palestinian resentment has an overlooked political value in transforming Israeli-Palestinian relations. Drawing on Edward Said’s qualified concept of humanism, which recognises the particularities of oppression and the goal of the universal, Sahhar examines the rupture between the conditions that actualised the state of Israel and the consequences of this political reality for the Palestinian people. While forgiveness has been viewed as key to community healing in divided societies, it is ineffective where the dominant group fails to apprehend and acknowledge wrong done. To the contrary, reconciliation requires recuperation of the experiences of the oppressed. Paradoxically, it is argued that incorporating these resentments into public discourse may serve to allay Jewish-Israeli anxiety about future cooperation. Following the work of essayist and Holocaust survivor Jean Amery, Sahhar argues that resentment is an essential moral and political response in the case of Israel/Palestine. It is proposed that resentment could address historical injustices obscured by 70 years of reified Israeli national narrative and the resultant disjuncture between Jewish- Israeli understanding of the contemporary conflict and Palestinian emphasis on its origins. If recognition is indispensable to improved relations, then resentment could elucidate Jewish- Israeli guilt, and encourage a transformative shift towards responsibility.

Acknowledgments

Many thanks to the JICS managing editors, Paula Muraca and Vince Marotta, for their support and patience, to the referees for their time, expertise and helpful comments, to Karthick PanneerSelvam for support and, finally, to the authors for their wonderful work throughout the process of writing and revising.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

G. J. Breyley

G. J. Breyley is an Adjunct Senior Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, Australia, and convenor of the Central and West Asia and Diasporas Research Network. She has published widely on cultural history, music and literature, especially in the contexts of Iran and the Iranian diaspora.