For our September 2018 NEWTON bouquet, we chose to focus on refugees and migrants, as these two groups/categories are becoming increasingly integral to any current political, academic, and media discussions of the Middle East and elsewhere, given this is an era espousing the highest numbers of displacement (as refugees, IDPs, or migrants) in history. Many of the pieces included in this month's bouquet outline the various ways that forced displacement and willful migration impact—often on a psychological, emotional, and physical level—the lives of individuals who have relocated. Other pieces discuss the ways that refugees and migrants, once relocated and/or resettled, influence and change the culture and landscape around them in significant ways.
1) Ilana Feldman, The Challenge of Categories: UNRWA and the Definition of a “Palestine Refugee”
“In this article, I explore the effects of changing administrative definitions of a 'Palestine refugee,' as well as of a refugee 'eligible for assistance,' on recipients.”
2) Ramy Aly, Becoming Arab in London: Performativity and the Undoing of Identity
“I was driven by the desire to tell the story of Arab London (at least one version of it), to understand Arab migration to Britain—but more specifically, to look at the how young people born and raised in London do Arabness in an everyday sense.”
3) Anaheed Al-Hardan, Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities
“The central concern in question is the 1948 Nakba, which has, at least since the 1993 Palestinian-Israeli Oslo Accords, been advocated as the ultimate patriotic signifier of the Palestinian past and present.”
4) Orit Bashkin, Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel
“I wanted to challenge the notion that Israel served as a melting pot for Jewish communities and to illustrate instead how the adoption of Israeli citizenship was a long, excruciating and traumatic experience.”
5) Sherene Seikaly, “How I Met My Great-Grandfather: Archives and the Writing of History”
“I detail Naim’s consumerism, his financial investments and property, his land dispute with his brother, and then trace his experience of dispossession after the Nakba, as a refugee in Lebanon.”
6) Wendy Pearlman, “Emigration and the Resilience of Politics in Lebanon”
“There is hardly a corner of the globe in which Lebanese have not settled, and the worldwide diaspora of Lebanese origin outnumbers those living within Lebanon’s borders.”
“The principal idea behind this book was to avoid the tedious and byzantine scholarly conversation about migration, and to instead simply provide readers with the narratives themselves.”
“Studying a location where different empires (the British, French, and Ottoman) interconnected with private companies and international organizations leads us to understand not only the perceptions and experiences of globalization, but also the attempts to regulate it.”
9) Attiya Ahmad, Everyday Conversions: Islam, Domestic Work and South Asian Migrant Women in Kuwait
“These women’s experiences in the Gulf also contrast with those of migrant domestic workers in other parts of the world, where religious conversions are little report
10) Louise Cainkar, “Global Arab World Migrations and Diasporas”
“We know that there are variations and commonalities in the experiences of Arab world migrants and among Arab world diasporas; we should begin to talk about what matters and why it matters.”
