Memory Studies in the Middle East: Where Are We Coming From and Where Are We Going?

Abstract

This article takes stock of the field of memory studies and where it has moved since the Arab uprisings. If the 1990s marked the first interest in memory studies, the 2000s opened the floodgates to a variety of approaches and localities. The aim is not to present a complete catalogue of memory studies in the Middle East, but rather to highlight some of the trends and patterns in the field and its development over time. It does so both by discussing key works and by focusing on an examination of memory studies about contemporary Lebanon. The article argues that memory studies in the 1990s drew on a particular understanding of transition that came to an abrupt end with the Arab Uprisings. 2011 marked a turning point both in the way the uprisings made scholars question the national framework previously privileged, and by stoking an interest in memories and histories of revolts other than those connected to the anti-colonial struggle. The latest wave of memory studies investigates the uses of online archives and the archive as metaphor for how storage functions for human memory, introducing new methodologies and theoretical directions.

Key Words:

• Archive
• Lebanon
• Memory studies
• Middle East
• Temporality

Notes

1 Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) The Savage Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), p. 233.

2 Ted Swedenburg (1995) Memories of Revolt: The 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Another closely related book came out shortly after, Susan Slyomovics (1998) The Object of Memory: Arabs and Jews Narrate the Palestinian Village (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

3 Drawing on the work of Maurice Halbwachs, which became very influential after the translation of parts of his landmark work from 1925 Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire [The social frameworks of memory] into English in 1992. Maurice Halbwachs (1992) On Collective Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

4 For a history of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, see https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/history/research/projects/cccs/about.aspx.

5 Jocelyne Dakhlia (1990) L’Oubli de la cité [The forgotten of the city] (Paris: La Découverte).

6 Jeffrey K. Olick, Vared Vinitzky-Seroussi & Daniel Levy (2011) Introduction, in Olick, Vinitzky-Seroussi & Levy (eds) The Collective Memory Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 3–62.

7 See Pierre Nora (1984) Les Lieux de mémoire [The places of memories] (Paris: Gallimard), p. xix. I prefer ‘social memory’ to ‘collective memory’ as not all social forms of memory collate to form collective narratives.

8 Karl Marx (1978) The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in Robert C. Tucker (ed.) The Marx-Engels Reader (New York: W.W. Norton), p. 594.

9 Ibid.

10 See Sune Haugbolle & Andreas Bandak (2017) The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Time and Ideology in the Arab Uprisings, Middle East Critique, 26(3), pp. 191–204.

11 Ussama Makdisi & Paul A. Silverstein (eds) (2006) Memory and Violence in the Middle East and North Africa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press).

12 Kanan Makiya (1991) The Monument: Art, Vulgarity, and Responsibility in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press); Lisa Wedeen (1999) Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press); and Eric Davies (2005) Memories of State: Politics, History, and Collective Identity in Iraq (Berkeley: University of California Press).

13 Orit Bashkin (2008) The Other Iraq: Pluralism and Culture in Hashimite Iraq (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

14 See Susan Slyomovics (2005) The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press).

15 Laleh Khalili (2007) Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

16 Sami Hermez (2017) War is Coming: Between Past and Future Violence in Lebanon (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press); Aïda Kanafani-Zahar (2011) Liban, La guerre et la mémoire [Lebanon: War and Memory] (Presses Universitaire de Rennes).

17 The latest being Chad Elias (2018) Posthumous Images: Contemporary Art and Memory Politics in Post-Civil War Lebanon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).

18 Bashir Saade (2016) Hizbullah and the Politics of Remembrance: Writing the Lebanese Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

19 For example, Asel Sawalha (2010) Reconstructing Beirut: Memory and Space in a Postwar Arab City (Austin: University of Texas Press).

20 Sune Haugbolle (2010) War and Memory in Lebanon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

21 Paul Connerton (1989) How Societies Remember (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

22 Jordan Gans-Morse (2013) Searching for Transitologists: Contemporary Theories of Post-Communist Transitions and the Myth of a Dominant Paradigm, Post-Soviet Affairs, 20(4), pp. 320–344.

23 See for example Hanan Toukan (2018) The Palestinian Museum, Radical Philosophy, 2.03, pp. 10–22.

24 Jessica Winegar (2006) Creative Reckonings: The Politics of Art and Culture in Contemporary Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press).

25 The examples are taken from the special issue, ‘The Ends of Revolution,’ in Middle East Critique, 26(2), 2017; and Sune Haugbolle & Andreas Bandak (2017) The Ends of Revolution: Rethinking Time and Ideology in the Arab Uprisings, Middle East Critique, 26(3), pp. 191–204.

26 Miriyam Aouragh (2017) L-Makhzan al-’Akbari: Resistance, Remembrance and Remediation in Morocco, Middle East Critique, 26(2), pp. 241–263.

27 Raphael Lefevre (2013) Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

28 Samuli Schielke (2017) There will be Blood: Expectation and Ethics of Violence during Egypt’s Stormy Season, Middle East Critique, 26(2), pp. 205–220.

29 See the webpage depository, https://858.ma/home.

30 Enrico De Angelis (2019) The Controversial Archive: Negotiating Horror Images in Syria, The Arab Archive: Mediated Memories and Digital Flows, Donatella Della Ratta, Kay Dickinson, and Sune Haugbolle (eds) (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures). Available at: http://networkcultures.org/longform/2019/05/07/the-controversial-archive-negotiating-horror-images-in-syria/.

31 Ann Rigney (2018) Remembering Hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic, Memory Studies, 11(3), pp. 368–380.

32 Yifat Gutman, Adam Brown, Amy Sodaro (eds) (2010) Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (London: Palgrave Macmillan), p. 1.