It has been four years since we launched the first issue of Contemporary Levant. With four special issues and four regular issues, it has been a delight to cover a range of exciting themes and to watch our readership grow. With this in mind, it feels like the right time for my tenure as editor to come to end. I am delighted to hand over the editorship to Sarah Irving, who is sure to take the journal in exciting new directions. I would like to take this opportunity to thank the CBRL, members of the editorial board, our contributors, reviewers and readers for their support in shaping the journal in its early stages.
This year we ran the competition for the CBRL Prize for Best Paper (2019) again and we are pleased to offer the prize to Shatha Abu-Khafajah and Riham Miqdadi's programmatic article entitled ‘Prejudice, military intelligence and neoliberalism: Examining the local within archaeology and heritage practices in Jordan’. The article interrogates neoliberal governance practices of ‘participation’ in the context of heritage discourses in Jordan with the aim to challenge ‘passive and descriptive’ approaches to archaeology in the region. Lauren Banko's article ‘“A stranger from this homeland:” deportation and the ruin of lives and livelihoods during the Palestine Mandate,’ was awarded the 2019 CBRL Prize Honourable Mention for its compelling analysis of the impact of bordering policies on colonial citizenship – and its denial – in the context of British mandate Palestine.
Emanuel Schaeublin's piece moves to the contemporary Palestinian context as it investigates the Islamic obligation to give zakat in Nablus. Due to the security crackdowns that have blocked its usual institutional distribution, the practice of zakat is now conducted on a face-to-face basis. What kind of moral labour is required in these interactions? The article shows how the moral responsibility to address the needs of others is ‘socially distributed’ as it traces the different ways people work out how they ought to appear to each other as givers and receivers.
Rahaf Aldoughli's article focuses on Syrian nationalist songs. Covering two key periods during the Syrian Ba`th regime (the 1973 war to 1990 and 1990 to 2007), she shows how these songs construct what she calls a ‘masculinist national identity’ that conceals women's status in Syrian political culture.
Moving to an exploration of film, documentaries and ex-combatant memoirs in Lebanon, Walid Sadek's essay proposes that Lebanon's post-war period has now been replaced by a ‘time after time,’ when a new form of victimhood has emerged. He explores the ways ‘neo-victims’ ‘rehearse’ their victimisation in relation to a particular promise of a future, one ‘liberated from all that is unfinished in the past.’
Finally, in the From the Field section, Abdalhadi Alijla's powerful auto-ethnographic account speaks well to Lauren Banko's historical exploration of border crossing and deportability in mandate Palestine. He describes the insufferable trials of enduring violent and discriminating border regimes as a male Palestinian from Gaza. He shows how these momentary experiences have the power to reshape, change and shatter dreams, ambitious and aspirations.