Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (New Texts Out Now)

Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (New Texts Out Now)

Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (New Texts Out Now)

By : Ayşe Parla

Ayşe Parla, Precarious Hope: Migration and the Limits of Belonging in Turkey (Stanford University Press, 2019).*

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Ayşe Parla (AP): I would like to say pure intentionality and meticulous planning, but, as probably with most anthropological research, that would only be the less substantial and less interesting part of the story. The long trajectory that resulted in the book is one that combines chance, the political conjuncture, and love at first sight. Chance, because my very first encounter with my interlocutors was not at all deliberate. 

Nearly two decades ago, I stepped inside the Bogaziçi Library in Istanbul looking for archival sources on a completely different subject for which I had received an exploratory research grant. Well, it turned out that proposal looked better on paper and was not yielding much to go on with. Meanwhile, I was riveted by the stories told by the exceptionally resourceful librarians, many of whom were migrant women from Bulgaria, as they helped me track down material—stories about crossing the Bulgarian-Turkish border for the first time in 1989, their nostalgia for aspects of communism and especially education, their sense of betrayal at the repression of the Turkish minority during the last years of Jivkov’s regime… My frustration with the dead ends of the project I had intended to pursue was soon overshadowed with admiration and awe for the sometimes quiet and sometimes sassy audacity of these women who were remaking the world for themselves and their families in a country that simultaneously welcomed them as our “Turkish kin” and marked them as different, as “the Bulgarian migrants.”

These encounters constitute the initial passion I would subsequently carry with me through to the last sentence of the book. But they are not actually part of the book. And this is where the political conjuncture comes in. As Turkey increasingly became a country of migration post 1990, I noticed that the migrations from Bulgaria and state policy towards Bulgaristanlı also changed shape. No longer were ethnically Turkish migrants from Bulgaria granted citizenship automatically; they instead relied on temporary amnesties for several years. So, I decided to embark on brand new fieldwork, which lasted for another five years, following the legalization quest of those migrants arriving from Bulgaria after 1990, with the goal of capturing that peculiar tension between continuing ethnic privilege and increasing economic and legal precarity.

What slips through the cracks when the focus is only on crisis and desperation?

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

AP: At its broadest, Precarious Hope explores the terms and limits of belonging in contemporary Turkey through the perspective of a migrant group who are ethnically privileged, but economically precarious. Even as they join the informal labor market in Turkey, their cultural and legal recognition as “soydaş,” which I translate as “racial kin,” gives the post-1990 Turkish migrants from Bulgaria a certain leverage when compared to other undocumented migrants and asylum seekers in Turkey hailing from Iran, Afghanistan, the former Soviet Union, sub-Saharan Africa, and most recently, of course, Syria. My ethnographic challenge was to ask what happens when we shift the lens away from the figure of the downtrodden migrant whose hope is often framed as “a hope against hope.” What slips through the cracks when the focus is only on crisis and desperation? The book demonstrates that the seemingly less eventful, more ordinary experiences reveal just as much about power, privilege, and entitlement. As Turkish and Muslim, the Bulgaristanlı migrants have historically been selected for inclusion as desirable subjects of the new nation-state, even as this has over time transformed into an exclusive inclusion. Yet their predicament provides an equally revealing window into Turkey’s citizenship regime. The book posits that in order to lay bare the full implications of differentiated citizenship practices in Turkey, and in particular, the religious and ethno-racial terms of belonging on which the Turkish nation-state continues to be predicated, we need to take to task not only the boundaries drawn to exclude and repress those who are deemed foreign, but also the borders opened on behalf of those who are deemed as (almost) the same.

The two main bodies of literature the book addresses are the anthropology of hope and the anthropology of precarity. There is a renewed fascination with and enthusiastic reclamations of hope not just in anthropology and critical theory but also in progressive politics and activism. Recall, for example, Rebecca Solnit’s international bestseller, Hope in the Dark, where hope is equated with action, where hopeful action is assumed to be universally legible, and where the agents of that action somehow constitute a self-evident, uniform “we.” Not all recent engagements with hope in critical theory are driven by this simplistic logic, of course. Examples of extremely sophisticated engagements with hope include the cultivation of hope as a method for self-knowledge, as proposed by anthropologist Hirokazu Miyazaki, or of radical hope posited by philosopher Jonathan Lear as a way of surviving extreme situations of cultural loss. Both go beyond analyzing hope and elevate it to the status of a principle, a virtue, or a method. So, my book is both inspired by and in critical conversation with these perspectives on hope. Rather than hope as a principle that informs in a fundamental fashion our ways of knowing and understanding, I am more interested here, following Ghassan Hage, in the unequal distribution of the grounds for hope among groups who are differentially positioned vis-à-vis legal and cultural resources for inclusion. The concept of “entitled hope” I develop in the book is particularly indebted to feminist legal scholar Patricia Williams’s notion of “structured expectation” in which members of a certain group, class, or race can assume hope in their encounters with the law.  

If entitlement is one side of the coin of hope, precarity is the other. The concept of “precarious hope,” in turn, aims to capture the uncertainty and insecurity that mark the experiences of Bulgaristanlı women as they cross the border, interact with officials in the formal and informal spaces of the law, fend off gendered harassment, try to register their children in school, or work in the domestic sector. In engaging with the literature on precarity, I sought to circumcise what has increasingly become an ever-expansive concept. I took care to distinguish precarity from vulnerability and, following Andrea Muehlebach on the affective aspects of precarity, historically situate Bulgaristanlı migrants’ current condition as part of a broader yearning for a return to a previously experienced, more secure status. Once again, then, I am interested in thinking through the tension between privilege and precarity, in how degrees of privilege factor into and play out within predicaments of precarity.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

AP: My work for the past decade on gendered violence, transnational migration, precarious labor, dispossession and the governance of difference has been situated at the intersections of the politico-legal and the affective-moral realms in Turkey. The book is very much a continuation of that trajectory. On the other hand, it is really with this book that I began to think of hope as a key category of analysis, both in relation to the specific experience of migration and also in relation to the realm of politics and governance.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AP: Those with a scholarly interest in the anthropology of emotion, transnational migration, and variegated citizenship, as well as those with geographical interest in Eastern Europe, Balkans, Turkey, and the Middle East are the obvious audience of this book. 

However, I would like to think that the book might appeal to anyone thinking about what it feels like to leave behind a home, to yearn for a child left back at that home, to work late into the night ironing, even when work hours are officially over, when it turns out your employer needs a particular dress to wear the next day, to get your hopes up for a resident permit only to be disappointed after waiting in a queue for hours, to brave the streets late at night as a single woman, or to put up with uncertainty in the hope of a better life for loved ones. 

The hope that permeates this book, therefore, is very much about perseverance and dignity under precarious conditions, something that enables people to “live sanely,” as Jarrett Zigon so concisely put it. And yet, there is also a darker side that I explore and one which does not allow mine to be an entirely redemptive narrative on hope. Given the structural constraints of non-egalitarian societies, hope can also become a scarce good that one keeps for oneself and shields from others. In this case, it dovetails with the logic of Turkey’s migration regime that selects, rewards, discriminates, and deports according to a rigid hierarchy of belonging, one that is based on ethnic and religious kinship. My ultimate wish therefore would be to communicate an equivocal approach to hope that captures its ambiguities: hope has the potential to enable or to disable, to inspire or to obscure, depending on the context, its object, and its justifications. Viewing hope as a moral stance is thus not incompatible, I suggest, with identifying ways in which practices of hope can become complicit in exclusionary acts.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AP: My current project, “Graveyards, Necropower and Present Absences,” turns to the post-genocide dispossession of Armenians in Turkey and the legalization and cultural normalization of dispossession. It tracks necropolitical policies of destruction and the confiscation of Armenian cemeteries as well as the care and preservation by the community of other remaining cemeteries. Attending to both the inadvertent durability and the quiet safeguarding of material remains, the project pursues, on the one hand, the continuities between past violence and present evasions, and on the other hand, the entanglements of silence, absence, and survival. 

 

Excerpt from the book

Precariousness may not always be named as dependence on the will and whim of a more powerful other, especially when it occurs under the guise of benevolence. Vasfiye migrated at the age of fifty-five from the southern Kırdjali region of Bulgaria after working as a crane operator during communism. She told me that her daughter, who was in her early twenties, used to work in a small textile shop. She worked kaçak (clandestinely), Vasfiye said, and told me the following incident: 

The atelier was very close to where she lived. Someone must have reported them, because there was a raid. Everything about my daughter screams that she is not a local, from how she dresses to how she moves around. But the police, they were honest folks, and they turned out to be people with humanity. “Do you have an ID?” they asked her. She lied and said yes. They asked where, and she told them at home. “Call home,” one of them said, “and have someone bring it while we wait here.” She was terrified, but then the boss intervened. He said to my daughter, “Come on, go home, my girl, and come back here right away with your ID.” And the police, they allowed her to leave. The moment she left, they said to the owner, “Look, of course we know she does not have ID.” They could easily have detained her, or they could have accompanied her home if they’d really wanted to check. The police then told the owner, “At least tell her to get a residence permit, and then let her work. Now if there is another raid, we will be placed in a difficult position for having looked away.”

In Humanitarian Reason (2011a) Didier Fassin insists on full recognition of the paradox that underlies the politics of compassion, which he argues has been given short shrift by philosophers who stress its egalitarian aspect. This egalitarian aspect of sympathy for the other, which results in the motivation to provide them with assistance, is often foregrounded at the expense of the hierarchical aspect of humanitarianism: the exercise of compassion in public space flows unidirectionally from a position of power toward a position of precarity. In bestowing upon the officer the virtue of someone “with humanity,” Vasfiye personalizes or moralizes what Fassin calls a “strictly sociological” situation. This is a situation in which the hierarchical relationship between the officer and the undocumented migrant annuls the possibility of reciprocity and obscures the structural violence that occasions the precarious predicament in the first place. When confronted with those who are at the edges of legality, the police have room to act in ways that are “full of humanity,” as Vasfiye described it, or in ways that are gratefully perceived as such by those who are made to feel that precarious escape is their best chance. Looking the other way approximates the humanitarian gesture. “This tension between inequality and solidarity, between a relation of domination and a relation of assistance, is constitutive of all humanitarian government,” writes Fassin (2011a, 3). 

Just like the police officer whom Vasfiye imbued “with humanity,” another police officer obliged Atiye and me by looking the other way when we went to the Mecidiyeköy police station to inquire about the June 2009 amnesty. Atiye, who came from a village near Razgrad, Bulgaria, was in her late fifties and had been engaging in circular migration for five years, working on and off as a nanny. Because she had family in Bulgaria, including a newborn granddaughter that she doted on, she considered her work in Turkey temporary and took extreme care not to lapse into illegal status. But this became very hard after the regulation allowing only ninety days of stay for every three months went into effect. 

Atiye had found a way despite the new regulation. Since 2007, she had been alternating with a co-villager. Each took a three-month turn to work for the same employer, who had agreed to the arrangement. On that day, we had gone to the police station to inquire whether Atiye, who was still within her ninety-day visa bracket, could take advantage of the amnesty to gain an extra three months of residency. I made the inquiries while Atiye stood without speaking, preserving her usual calm, graceful demeanor, which I had not ever seen shaken, not even while waiting in the most hectic of queues or in the midst of boisterous interactions with others. The police officer asked me, “Is she at the university, like you, hocam?” I was caught off guard, perhaps by his amicable manner, since I was used to being waved off by officials, especially on such crowded days. “No,” I replied, regretting it the moment it came out of my mouth. He said matter-of-factly, “But you know, it is forbidden.” “I know,” I said, extremely uneasy, dreading the consequences of my foolish admission. He lowered his voice to a whisper. “So unfair that these folks do not get a work permit easily. If she were from the Philippines, she would probably have gotten it by now. So hard, their situation. There, they are persecuted because they are Turkish. Here, they are treated as Bulgarians. An old uncle [honorific for an older man couched in kinship terms] came here once. I told him, ‘Sit down. Tell me.’ He sat and cried and cried. All the things they had to endure just because they are Turkish, spoke Turkish, and they prayed according to Islamic precepts.”

These two official gestures of looking the other way—the first in the actual scene of breach of the law and the second in my confession of a breach—present a further twist to the lack of reciprocity identified by Fassin in the logic of compassion at work in humanitarian attention. Compassion is triggered not because one’s universal humanity is exposed in all its vulnerability, but because the subject in question exhibits the right traits of Turkishness and Islam. Compassion in this instance is based not on shared humanity, but on ethnic and religious kinship. Atiye becomes the object of compassion because she belongs to a group who “spoke Turkish, and they prayed according to Islamic precepts.” The already hierarchical nature of the humanitarian gesture is thus further delimited in the Turkish legal and policing context by the circumscription of the object of empathy to ethnic and religious kin.

As a technical designation, the term af, amnesty, refers to exemption from the rule. But in colloquial usage, amnesty also means, as it does in English, forgiveness, mercy, and pardon. In fact, the most immediate connotation of the Turkish word is pardon and forgiveness. Waiting for a technical exemption is thus evoked in language as waiting for one’s forgiveness by the state. “I have been clandestine for nine years now,” Asaniye Hanım, with whom Atiye and I had struck up a conversation while at the Mediciköy police station, declared. Then she added, with unmistakable aplomb, “I have not once paid fines for overstay. I simply wait for my amnesty. We know anyhow that there will be an amnesty at some point.” My amnesty, Asaniye had said, just like Şefika, who had shrugged off the disappointment of her absence from the list of nine hundred by reassuring herself that “we will get our amnesty in June.” Among other Bulgaristanlı women, too, the proprietary deployment of the term as my amnesty was a recurrent figure of speech.

On the one hand, reclaiming the amnesty that instrumentalizes migrants and their votes is a means to use the system right back. The migrants were aware that the state grants them amnesty in exchange for political mobilization. But there were different interpretations of the government’s strategic act. Some were outraged: “They are playing with us.” Others were pragmatically indifferent: “So what? If it will give me temporary regularization, I will take it.” Yet others were commiserative: “Well, it is natural for the state to want the Turkish party in Bulgaria to be strong.” Notwithstanding the different opinions they hold toward the amnesties, migrants had come to rely on and expect these exceptions as a convenient fix, even if temporary.

On the other hand, while savviness and strategic disaffection were at work in taking advantage of these state-sponsored amnesties, there is also a way in which the appropriation of the amnesty as my amnesty or our amnesty engaged in the interpellation work of the state. I never heard Bulgaristanlı migrants express guilt for lapsing into undocumented status. In that, they were immune to the criminalizing discourse of the state as it apportions legality and illegality. Nonetheless, the discursive circulation and enactment of these technical exemptions as pardons result in a certain subjectivization whereby waiting for one’s amnesty restored the image of the state as the benevolent grantor of forgiveness. Though the Bulgaristanlı migrants had no illusions about the purity of the government’s motives, they partially submitted to an acceptance of legality that was bestowed upon them in the form of a pardon.

But it is not only the ethnographer who should presume to discern the ideological stakes around this legal term. The hierarchical nature of the humanity that may be exercised by the official at the border, the police station, or the workplace was not lost on many of my interlocutors. A group of us waiting in line to inquire whether Bahriye Hanım’s sister, who was within the time bracket of her current residence permit when the new amnesty was issued, could still benefit from the extra three months that it offered. During our heated discussion of various technicalities, Bahriye Hanım interjected, visibly exasperated, “Tell me this. We keep saying ‘amnesty this,’ ‘amnesty that.’ Why is this even called an amnesty/af? Isn’t it something . . .” She paused, searching for the right words. “Isn’t this something we should simply be demanding?” 

 

*Stanford University Press provides a 20% discount for the listeners of the Keyman Podcast if you purchase the book directly from their website. Follow this link and enter the Promo Code PARLA20 at the checkout to purchase the book with a 20% discount.

Camila Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate (New Texts Out Now)

Camila Pastor, The Mexican Mahjar: Transnational Maronites, Jews, and Arabs under the French Mandate (University of Texas Press, 2017).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Camila Pastor (CP): As I started graduate school in September 2001, disturbing and urgent questions about how the Middle East is imagined and subjected to changing forms of administration suddenly disoriented me. I had arrived at UCLA with a project on insurgency in southern Mexico, provoked by Mexico’s late twentieth-century Zapatista moment. In a mad witch hunt, street violence and Homeland Security regulations targeted Latinos along with Arabs. I marveled at the swift mediatic and administrative production of Middle Eastern subjects as intractable Others, and at the ease with which violent state practice infiltrated university administration and everyday interaction among scholars. The legitimation of a global “war on terror” begged alternative perspectives. I set out to write a connected history of Middle America and the Middle East. In the absence of a history colonialism between the two regions, there might be space for recognition, for solidarity in lieu of subjection. Mobile subjects circulating transregionally offered the perfect bridge.  

In my struggle to make sense of reactions to September 11, I discovered the modern history of the Arab world, exploring it through a stance that appeared to be missing from regional scholarship: mobility. Despite theoretically sophisticated new perspectives on transnationalism and diaspora, I became aware of deeply problematic, normative assumptions embedded in migration studies. The center-periphery model haunts scholarship, along with methodological nationalism and diverse orientalisms. Much migration literature effaces historical specificity, casting the migrant as a universal, a-temporal type. These migrants of an impoverished, policy dominated imagination are all dispossessed, marginal third world subjects seeking settlement in the Global North. In this narrative, “receiving” states’ expect mobile people to settle (stop being mobile) and shed their “origins” to join the national “mainstream,” in celebratory accounts of the upward mobility of immigrants. Alternatively, scholars emphasize diasporic subjects’ investment in “homeland politics,” treating them as if circulation and displacement were of no consequence to their trajectories. Even Mahjar studies recognizing differently anchored subjects in movement assume that they circulate from colonial to metropolitan geographies, transatlantic migrations from the Middle East to America narrowly understood as seeking the United States. 

A transnational myself, I was constantly uncomfortable with such programmatic accounts of mobility. As a postcolonial subject, an interloper from the South, I found many Euroamerican scholars bound and gagged by area studies expectations and identity politics; historically specific, contextually informed accounts of mobility foreclosed. South-South vision afforded a sense of connected histories in the administrative and representational practices through which the Mashriq and Middle America are subjected by the same global Euroamerican formation of power. It also allowed me to challenge the widespread if unspoken notion that only Middle Eastern subjects, or their colonizers, are authorized to write historically about the Middle East.

The Mahjar, a moveable place, a global space inscribed with a variety of national and regional differentials, invites us to shed expectations about the directionality and permanence of movement.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does it address? 

CP: Mobility was central to Mahjaris’ personal and collective projects. The Mahjar, a moveable place, a global space inscribed with a variety of national and regional differentials, invites us to shed expectations about the directionality and permanence of movement. The book tells the story of moving Mashriqis at the crossroads of overlapping jurisdictions and colonial projects. Mexican Mahjar subjects were variously colonial, postcolonial, and global. Crossing French colonial archives, ethnography across Mashriq and Mahjar and in family archives, Mahjar press and literatures, and various state archives in Mexico (court records, foreign national registries, diplomatic archives, presidential correspondence), I reconstruct conversations and processes that shaped migrant trajectories from the late nineteenth century through to the late 1940s. My theoretical roots are in historical anthropology, subaltern studies, feminism, and postcolonial scholarship.

The migrant population circulating between the Mashriq and the Americas remained highly mobile and cultivated connectivity, not only to its localities of origin but also to many regional and national Mahjars. As a space of settlement and transit, the Mexican Mahjar was tied through the circulation of migrants and their cultural production to the North American Mahjar dominated by the New York “mother colony,” the South American Mahjars of Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, and a European Mahjar centered in France. It integrated a Central American Mahjar of migrants living in Guatemala, Honduras, and Haiti. Migrants moved along multiple sites of anchorage in the pursuit of kin, profit, and stability.

The horizon of these mobile subjects shifted significantly between their Ottoman modern framing and the construction of a French mandatory state. Migrants were subject to the overlapping jurisdictions of disparate authorities, and to a confluence of French, Mexican, and Arab colonial projects. These intersected with American and British consular authorities active in Mexico. Through trade blacklists during World War I, and then French attempts to enlist the migrant population as Syrio-Lebanese in census and subsequent registration procedures, migrants who did not align with French colonial projects in the Mashriq were subalternized.

The migrant population soon polarized into a handful of migrant notables, who established themselves as employers of less fortunate or more recent arrivals, and mediators between their clients and authorities—be it the French Mandate state, its consulates in the Americas, or local national authorities in the Mahjar. Migrant notables collaborated with the French to discipline, displace, and pauperize those targeted as not Francophile, not Christian, and therefore not white. The most systematically affected were Muslim migrants, who were labelled as suspect by British, American, and French authorities, regardless of their actual political practice and despite their interconfessional networks to other Mahjari merchants.  

As Mexican authorities passed increasingly stringent legislation curtailing and eventually banning the arrival of working-class Middle Eastern migrants in Mexico in the wake of the Great Depression, migrant notables and community intellectuals developed a complicated defense of their own desirability in xenophobic post-revolutionary Mexico. Mobilizing Phoenicianism and Ottoman travel narratives recovered during the Nahda, they argued that as the longtime conquerors of Spain, Phoenicians and Arabs were equivalent to the Spanish conqueror in Latin American social formations. Negotiating with Mexican criollo (Spanish descent) ideologues in the press and other public fora, they jointly bisected Latin American populations into civilized criollos and inadequately civilized mestizo and Amerindian majorities, whom Mahjaris and criollos had the joint duty of bringing into the fold of civilization.

Mobility to Middle America practically disappeared after Syrian and Lebanese independence, during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The book’s final chapters turn to migrants’ social mobility and the production of collective memory among Mahjaris in Mexico. I survey a variety of textual memory genres marked by contrasting forms of production, circulation, and authority and explore different strands of Mexican orientalism, as they collapse Arab and Jew, making them indistinguishable to the Catholic eye.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

CP: This project bears the traces of my socialization into the field of Middle East mobility studies through an Anglophone training in historical anthropology. I stumbled onto “the archive” as site and source in Kaslik, encountering the French colonial archive during my doctoral field research in Lebanon. Radical invitations to bring time into anthropological analysis suddenly made sense. The coloniality or colonial effects of casting “the Other” outside temporality and history were strikingly incarnate in the very foreign artifact that was to my ethnographic training an imperial state archive. It fascinated and repulsed me; it was perverse. The “grey literature” of administration was populated by officials attempting to construct their transnational regime over migrating subjects, anxious to legitimate the Mandate, coming to colonial administration from diverse trajectories themselves. Migrant voices, filtered through orientalist and rationalist projects, interpellated different authorities as their own, forging unequal networks with them and amongst themselves. The co-construction of categories of allegiance and administration, the polarization of migrants along class lines following a Mashriqi tradition of notability and a colonial logic of protection, the interaction of migrants and the French consular apparatus with Mexican and Central American logics of inclusion and subordination—it was a kaleidoscopic, always unfinished entangling of projects with different jurisdictions, claims to authority and scales of operation. A complicated, floating world anchored and fractured by new state boundaries in construction. My ethnographic reading of the archive was informed by interviews and participant observation with migrant families. It was within these other archives, interactions, and conversations that gendered dynamics became most salient, evolving into a necessary dimension of my analysis.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

CP: I hope the book will be relevant to scholars of mobility, and those more broadly interested in the history of the modern Middle East. Scholarship on mobility—whether the burgeoning field of Mahjar studies exemplified by the excellent work of fellow historians and anthropologists or Middle East mobility studies writ large, including work on Indian Ocean Muslim merchant lineages and communities, the Nahda’s intellectual exchanges, the radical Mediterranean, the Suez canal as a site of transit, global Muslim mobilities in the age of steam and print, global governance and sex work, or transnational anticolonial intellectual networks across Morocco and Egypt—has suggested for over a decade now that we need to rethink regional historiography in relation to mobile subjects. As mobility becomes normalized in academic analyses through theoretical shifts across disciplines and the production of a critical mass of exceptional research centrally concerned with moving subjects, centering mobility as a form of sociability, how we conceive of stasis and its enforcement by different agents shifts. Destabilizing “regions” and their disciplinary containment in area studies traditions, imagining social formations as “unbound” or variously “trans” instead complicates the historiography of states and national projects but also of subject formation, inaugurating all sorts of archival, analytic, and narrative challenges as well as emancipatory possibilities. 

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

CP: French colonial concern with mobility suggested new avenues of inquiry, into the colonial state’s surveillance of working women. The French mandate in the Mashriq, French administrations in Algeria, and French and Spanish protectorates in Morocco were fundamentally unsettled by subjects that destabilized distinctions between colonizer and colonized. Metropolitan women travelling across these geographies beyond the channeling discipline of institutions were liable to undo distinctions that legitimated logics of colonial rule. 

I follow French, Spanish, and Arab women trying to make a living in a wide range of seasonal or otherwise impermanent occupations during the first half of the twentieth century. They provided modern services in ports and other urban spaces in the Mashriq and North Africa, from cooking and specialized care of Western style dress and textiles, childcare or instruction, to coffee and bar tending, factory work, performance and prostitution. These subaltern metropolitans moved across urban sites, imperial boundaries, and domains of employment. Often suspected or accused of selling sexual services and favors, they invite us to complicate the evolving distinction between whoredom and prostitution against a backdrop of changing gender norms, women’s movements, and women’s growing economic and erotic autonomy. Prostitution emerges not only as a form of seasonal labor and an increasingly institutionalized subjection, but as an accusation with particular moralizing effects for subaltern women despite their “colonizer” status. Their mobility was framed by landscapes of sexual access in changing public and domestic arrangements: various types of marital alliances and new cohabitations, ranging from different kinds of formal marriage to concubinage, slavery, the hosting of celebrated traveling performers, and other itinerant liaisons. I am also working on a historical ethnography of conversion to Islam in Mexico, which evolved from the Mexican Mahjar’s history of Islamophobia.

  

Excerpt from the book 

Mahjar - space of migration, diasporic homeland, dwelling in movement- was the term used by Arabic speakers to describe geographies and sociabilities inhabited by muhajirin, migrants, since the late nineteenth century. The Mahjar was a transnational field, weaving together social formations across distinct national, imperial, and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. I will use the terms Mahjari and migrant to refer to people who moved and to their descendants, insofar as they continued to engage the Mahjar as a social space, dwelling at a crossroads, in transit, subject to multiple sovereignties.

[...]

The Mahjar has long been studied through national histories of reception of Arabic-speaking migrants. This book argues that the Mahjar was a multifaceted transregional formation that migrants inhabited as the floating world of elsewhere once they had shaken their moorings in village and Ottoman belonging. This global Mahjar of the migrant imagination was, however, fragmented by the legalities of national and imperial constructions. Migrants were subject to distinct administrative practices that operated simultaneously, constituting overlapping frames to migrant trajectories. When we read different archives in conjunction, particular national and regional Mahjars become apparent- the Mexican Mahjar, the Latin American and North American Mahjars- in which national and regional politics intersected first with Ottoman and later with French imperial practice. Mahjaris have also been the object of interventions by the universalist jurisdictions of religious institutions- initially the Maronite, Greek Orthodox and Melkite churches, later also Zionist Judaism, and eventually a proselytizing Islam. This book recognizes the importance of national jurisdictions channeling mobility, while attending to imperial circuits and migrant notables framing migrant trajectories, to offer a colonial history of mobility centered on migrants as agents crafting networks and mobilizing discordant authorities.

The migration’s pulse reflects the bewildering variability of individual experience as well as social processes framing divergent trajectories: the social location from which a journey was initially undertaken; its timing; and the social and political conditions organizing departures, arrivals, transits and returns… young men hope for economic success, political exiles flee regional reconfigurations, journalists and professors address global Mahjari publics, and women work in the administration of memory. Their mobility was experienced and narrated as conquest, diaspora, exile or pilgrimage. Making Mashriqis in movement the unit of analysis, I follow mobilities and migrant constructions of memory, attempting to track their logics and make sense of their constraints, intending to grasp the human experience of broad structural and discursive phenomena, to explore global history on an intimate scale.

[...]

If Amrika was a land of plenty, Latin America, Amrika al Jnubiya, was narrated as a place to discover and conquer. Arriving as liberal Latin American states invested in infrastructure in order to better link up with a global industrial order, Mashriqis contributed to the creation of regional markets through their itinerant credit economies and transnational business networks and profited from the expansion of emergent economies in the Belle Epoque global moment. Ottoman subjects brought with them newly articulated Nahda claims regarding the place of Arabic speakers in modernist global hierarchies, which imagined Native American populations as racially and civilizationally subordinate to Arabs. Mahjari racializations as white in Middle American postcolonial formations, though briefly contested by xenophobic nationalisms in the wake of the Great Depression, consolidated their reading as potential local elites.

[...]

The recognition of Mahjaris as simultaneously imperial subjects (Ottoman, French) and postcolonial national subjects (Lebanese, Syrian, Mexican) alerts us to the fact that they navigated geographies framed by distinct and unequal projects. Trajectories in the Mexican Mahjar were afforded by the intersection of Arab, French and Mexican colonial modernisms. 

An exercise in historical anthropology, this book will explore the transition from the Ottoman to the mandate moment in the making of the Mexican Mahjar. The transition was vital, establishing new boundaries within Mahjar networks and communities, organizing institutions, aligning categories of subjects. It was essential to migrant social mobility during the second half of the twentieth century, when geographic mobility diminished and Mexican Mahjar dynamics were fundamentally focused on migrants’ differential access to material and moral accumulation. Mandate-era understandings continue to structure migrant memory work, Mahjari self-orientalizations, and Mexican Orientalisms and Islamophobias- conditioning trajectories, as recent arrivals with the right connections and attributes capitalize on definitions of Mashriqi privilege in Mexican public culture.

[...] 

The colonial encounter has been studied in historical anthropology and postcolonial scholarship through boundaries inherited from national history. Scholars have often concentrated on encounters between colonial administrators and colonized subjects within the elastic, expansive boundaries of a single empire. Official archives organized as national repositories, and the weight of historians’ assumptions of national histories as natural units are powerful deterrents to global imaginations. When scholars look at more than one imperial venture, work slides into comparative key. When anthropologists tackle the question of mobility across imperial domains, they construct ethnographies anchored in temporal displacement.

An important part of this book’s contribution is extending explorations of the colonial encounter through geographies, imaginaries and politics missing from the conversation. Conceptualizing a colonial and postcolonial global, recognizing that colonialism afforded encounters not only within the expanding political boundaries of empire but across domains of differently constituted sovereignties requires additional theorizing. Revisionist historians of nationalism have extensively pursued the work of undoing the nation as an omnipresent referent by recognizing it as a political project proposed by dissident elites at particular historical conjunctures. We need not only to denaturalize nations and nationalism, but to move toward the theorization of alternative, parallel, nested, intersecting social formations. Creating a history of movement requires shifting the boundaries of analysis to recognize the spheres of action of various agents: migrants, states, and religious authorities among others. These overlap only partially, are frequently at odds and need to be understood as fundamentally unfinished, discordant processes in the making. The story of Mashriqis in movement destabilizes regional historical narratives as much as it reflects the history of the regions that their migration weaves together. 

This book is about encounters at a colonial crossroads where Ottoman, French and Mexican civilizing missions intersected, attempting the administration of mobile populations of the Ottoman Arab provinces, later the French mandate territories of Syria and Lebanon. As I step beyond methodological nationalism to consider the world of the migrants, two aspects of the Mexican Mahjar become salient: migrants’ experience in spinning transnational life-worlds and a transnational imagination at work in the administrative practices that they were subjected to by the French, during the mandate and by postcolonial governments and religious authorities since then.  Stabilizing and inscribing difference at the Mexican Mahjar crossroads was particularly challenging. Changing imperial projects fueled subversion by various subalterns and destabilized even exceptionally successful trajectories, as did the ambivalence of postcolonial Middle Eastern and Middle American modernist nationalisms. 

I analyze the colonial encounter as global process through the everyday lives of mobile subjects. I place the colonizer and subaltern in a single social field, recognizing that Mahjari notables and Middle American criollos were both colonized and colonizers. Mahjari notables were subject first to the Ottoman center and later to French and criollo elites; they in turn constantly attempted to colonize other Mahjaris and Middle American natives. Criollos invoked their European heritage to legitimate a monopoly on power and their right to categorize Mahjaris as desirable or not, yet they were subordinate to French and American imperial projects in global geopolitics. In the twenty-first century, robust Middle American Orientalisms remain blind to Mahjari diversity even as they celebrate solidarities with the Orient.

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As a historical anthropologist writing a history of the present, I flag chronologies but do not reduce analysis to temporal sequence, attempting instead to follow cultural categories as processes, produced in the interaction of differentially situated subjects. Following feminist ethnography, each chapter tells a story of intersections while centering one of three main actors: Mahjaris in their diversity; the global colonial French state under construction; and Mexican elite, state and popular interventions. Since each of these heterogeneous actors has different genealogies, chronology in each chapter recedes and adjusts, bringing into focus the cultural history necessary to situate an interaction within the broad transition from Ottoman to mandate Mahjar. The two final chapters reach into the contemporary, focusing on migrants’ memory work and on early twenty-first century Mexican Orientalisms afforded by the Ottoman-to-mandate history. 

Geographical anchoring fluctuates across chapters; attention focuses initially on Mashriq and then on Mahjar, circling on to how the Mashriq is remembered or imagined in the Mahjar in the final chapters. The Mexican Mahjar emerges as transnational not only in regard to the Eastern Mediterranean but also across a web of American migrations. Mashriqis in Central America and the Caribbean- Haiti, Guatemala, and Honduras- were often integral to the Mexican Mahjar through the circulation of migrants and their cultural production. The press and the notables of the North American Mahjar, with its heart in the mother colony of New York City, were constant interlocutors, and the Mexican-US border a vehicle for the production of value.