Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani, eds., Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani, eds., Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani, eds., Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (New Texts Out Now)

By : Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani

Alexa Firat and R. Shareah Taleghani (eds.), Generations of Dissent: Intellectuals, Cultural Production, and the State in the Middle East and North Africa (Syracuse University Press, 2020).

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

Alexa Firat and Shareah Taleghani (AF & ST): Our book developed out of an American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) seminar panel we organized in 2015. The seminar gathered scholars working on numerous forms and histories of dissent from around the world—from Brazil to North Korea. We saw clearly that it was an area of interest for many and were inspired by the broad-ranging, engaged discussions in which we participated. For this book, however, we decided to focus on MENA because this is the area of our research.

Both of our research interests have been, for the most part, situated in modern Syrian cultural productions, mainly literary. The entrenchment of the Assad regime since 1970 and the development of its policies and the effects of such policies on culture have always informed our work, without necessarily being the main parameter for structuring research questions.

With the onset of uprisings in 2010-11, we witnessed how mainstream media narratives of revolution were being framed as something entirely new or disconnected from earlier opposition movements, whereas we (and obviously oppositional activists and other scholars) were aware of and had studied articulations and acts of dissent throughout the twentieth century, but in particular in a post-colonial, or post-WWII construct of the region.

The essays point to a very basic conceptualization of dissent as a discursive process that expresses a difference of opinion or point of view.

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

AF & ST: The book collectively addresses the ways in which artists (broadly speaking) purvey dissent in their work in complex, sometimes ambiguous ways, i.e., how they respond to, work against, and/or navigate state hegemony through creative expression. The essays point to a very basic conceptualization of dissent as a discursive process that expresses a difference of opinion or point of view. The creative forms of dissidence discussed in the volume demonstrate the productive and disruptive significance of individual or localized acts in creating an alternative space, counter-narrative, and/or counter-public to those constructed and enforced by the state.

The ten chapters are divided into three broad categories: the dismantling and negotiation of state discourses; exile and dissidence; and subversive aesthetics. The authors analyze these issues through a number of media: cinema (both feature and documentary), literature, journalism, and intellectual discourse. 

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

AF & ST: Thematically the collection connects to our individual work. 

AF: I have written previously about literary systems and fields in Syria, from the inception of the Syrian Writers’ Collective in 1951 to the one emerging out of that stratified structure in 2012, challenging and countering the assertions of the former in a battle for symbolic power. I have also looked at how the symbolic power invested in the struggle to narrate the Syrian Revolution has led to innovations in the field on a number of levels. 

For my essay in this collection, I read the exploration of identity in two Jordanian novels as subversive acts that unsettle national narratives of belonging. What drew me to read and investigate these two novels together—apart from their authors’ national identity—was that, despite differing perspectives and reasons for exile, the identity of both main characters fragment, causing crises and revelations that assert a sense of belonging that is both personal and historical. It seemed to me that both reject identity/ies imposed from above—political, social, ethnic—while also acknowledging their essence. 

ST: My main research project has been centered on the literary writings of Syrian detainees and the genre that has been debatably defined as “prison literature” (adab al-sujun). While such works can be read as reflecting resistance to state repression, I have focused on how these texts intersect with Arabic literary experimentalism and both echo and challenge human rights discourse. Though this body of writing is generally produced by those who have engaged in a direct political struggle against the state, with some paying the highest possible price, I also became interested in understanding how particular cultural producers construct an aesthetics of dissent in their works through less direct forms of opposition and also how those in creative or artistic fields negotiate censorship and the state’s attempts to co-opt their work. In the process of researching Syrian prison writings over many years, I also learned more about the works of Syrian filmmakers such as Mohamed Malas, Hala Abdullah, and the late Omar Amiralay, and I became interested in writing about visual culture. My essay in the collection is about the role of visual and verbal irony in Amiralay’s films. 

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

AF & ST: We hope it will be read by scholars and students of modern and contemporary Middle East cultural production as well as general audience readers interested in learning more about dissent and cultural forms in the Middle East. Generally speaking, it is a multi-disciplinary collection that would suit both undergraduate and graduate courses. The collection introduces artists and cultural producers whose work has not been studied very much, especially in English, and/or from a perspective of dissent. We hope that the book will contribute to and intervene in scholarly analyses of the intersection of political opposition and cultural production in the region, provide a richer and greater breadth of knowledge of forms of dissidence in the region, and encourage further study of the works of cultural producers from around the MENA.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

AF: These days I am looking at the intersection of aesthetics, experimentation, and the infusion of history into literary narratives. At this stage I am focused on Syrian authors, mainly fiction, but I am open to all literary genres. There is so much attention on the regime and politics when talking about Syrian cultural production, we often lose touch with thinking about the craft of writing: what are the tools, materials, sources, and philosophies of art that authors rely on to craft their work? I also want to ask questions about how these connections to the past not only tell us something about the present, as often discussed with historical fiction, but what they show us about our readings of the past and the archives they are culled from. I am also working on the translation of Mamduh Azzam’s novel Castle of Rain.  

ST: I have been working on the final edits of my book, Readings in Syrian Prison Literature, which will be coming out in the fall. With a group of colleagues, I am also finalizing a co-edited and co-translated collection of poetry by Faraj Bayrakdar titled Dove in Free Flight, which hopefully will be out in the fall or winter. For my main new research project, I am exploring the interplay of satire, nostalgia, and dissent (not just against the state) in works of modern Middle East cultural production, including literature and film. I am interested in exploring how particular satirical works express a nostalgic as opposed to utopian impulse.

J: Why the title “Generations of Dissent”? What are you trying to suggest with it?

AF & ST: Although the original ACLA seminar was titled “Between Dissidence and Cooption,” we like the way the word generation evokes multiple meanings: generation as an action, to generate, to create, to propel forward; how power generates and interacts with opposition and resistance in complex ways. Although the essays do not focus on cross-generational comparison, we also had in mind the importance of highlighting artistic and creative expressions of opposition to authoritarian regimes by those of earlier generations prior to 2010-2011, including those who have been engaged in a long term, sometimes decades long, confrontation, and critique of such regimes. 


Excerpt from the book

From “Ghosting Dissent: Tariq Tequia’s Zanj Revolution

By Suzanne Gauch

Conceived and begun prior to the uprisings of 2011, yet overlapping with them in its filming, Zanj follows on the traces of the generations of dissent near and far that momentarily crystallized in those uprisings. Even the film’s title signals its spectrality, for Zanj Revolution recalls other fictional works, most of all with the individuating definite article. One of these is The Zanj RevolutionDiwan al-Zanj in Arabic, a well-known play on the same topic by Tunisian writer ‘Izz al-Din al-Madani, one of a number of intellectuals of the 1960s and 1970s who were captivated by the history of the Zanj and created literary works inspired by it. Yet the imperative of a revolution that would bring about a just world, free of domination and oppression, keeps vanishing, victories elusive and records presumed lost, or rather, illegible. For if the process of creating an archive or historical representation is a matter of codifying events according to prevailing logic and recording conventions, what of that which seeks to break with that logic and those conventions? Always only half-legible, a chronicle of ghosting, or vanishing, distinct from but overlapping at times with the haunting evoked by Marx’s famous formulation, Zanj Revolution demonstrates that not just historical actors and records, but also audiences, are constantly slipping away.

Described by some critics as prescient, Teguia’s film anticipates not so much the uprisings of 2010-11 as the failure to see and hear their messages and motives both abroad and at home, quick as multiple sides were to assimilate the protests to prevailing models and demands before pushing them once again to the wayside. When an antiquarian whom Battuta meets in Beirut tells the Algerian journalist in parting that he has no artifacts that might reveal new, essential information about the Zanj, he adds: “No one has ever stepped into my shop carrying the great book of the Zanj, written by Ali ibn Muhammed. The book was lost or destroyed because it gave voice to the Zanj and not their masters. That book was much more valuable than any relic.” Tempting though it may be to lose ourselves in speculation of what that book might say, Zanj Revolution does not attempt to recreate this imaginary lost text. Rather, it probes the inexorable processes of ghosting that made the loss of that book—and its subsequent iterations—inevitable. Similarly, by collating clichés drawn from dominant cinematic languages and worldviews as much as counterlanguages and images, the film unravels a disjointed half-tale in which the dominant themes (or, better, modes) are an intertwining of half-perceptions, unsettled overdeterminations, and eloquent, apparent emptiness in which flashes of possibility occasionally appear. As Battuta replies to the Beiruti antiquarian’s advice to create his own map if he wants to know where the future is headed: “The map I’m drawing now has no key. It’s open on all sides.” 

In its simultaneous emphasis on invisibility and overdetermination, Zanj Revolution is deeply Algerian, even though little of it focuses on, or is set in, that country. Yes, Battuta is instantly identified as Algerian by other characters he meets (the film underscores the particularity of his dialect in playful dialogues with Nahla), reflecting the persistence of Algeria’s revolutionary history and continued political presence in the Arab world understood in its largest sense. Yet it is the film’s reflections of the necessary yet spectral audiences for Battuta’s reporting, coupled with the journalist’s perception of his own and his various subjects’ persistent entanglements in a counter history that crosses centuries and borders, that place Algeria at the center of the film’s consciousness. This other Algeria is a collection of citizens who find themselves alternately ghosted by and ghosting the nation’s postrevolutionary ideals, clashing local histories, global Islam, and the promises of neoliberalism. Battuta’s project, like that of Zanj Revolution itself, is restless and slippery, for, as Teguia remarks in an interview with Barlet, “it’s not easy to film ghosts.”

At the film’s outset, Battuta is in Berriane, in the Mzab region in the Algerian south, covering riots by Arab youth that target the region’s longstanding Mozabite (Berber) population. His first encounter there is with the presumed instigators of the riots, young Arabic-speaking men who set him on the tracks of the Zanj. Darting in and out of doorways and trailing Battuta as he walks through the desert city in one of the film’s initial scenes, these youths keep their faces covered with multicolored scarves and kaffiyeh, some veiled like desert nomads, evoking the Palestinian uprisings as much as revolutionaries everywhere. When the film skips ahead some moments to show them encircling Battuta in an abandoned white-walled room, their rapid-fire conversation is clipped by the film’s stuttering temporality as they demand to know what he is doing in the city. For his part, Battuta replies to their initial query with the single word “press,” presuming that the identity is sufficient to explain his activity, and immediately asks whether any of them have jobs. Suspicious, their apparent leader asks for whom he works and forbids him to take any photos. Until this point, little is striking about their conversation, other than the disorienting handheld camera work, which eschews a shot reverse shot format that would highlight tensions between the journalist and the group to focus instead now on white walls, now on different characters, sometimes after they have spoken. All of this contributes to the sense that the encounter dissolves spatiotemporal logic. Battuta himself appears at pains to hold and direct the focus of this circle of youths who seemingly bear little regard for the promises of documentation and representation that the journalist wields. Despite the banality of the verbal exchange, the youths dismiss the journalist’s authority, their disguised faces less indicative of a fear of reprisal than of a consciousness of their own ghosting, a simultaneous awareness of their predecessors’ and their own ultimate invisibility according to the geopolitics of the state, and certainly in the eyes of global, and even national, media audiences.

There follows a negotiation of the boundaries of Battuta’s work that centers precisely on this question of visibility. Battuta reassures the youths that he doesn’t work for the state, and one of them dismisses the distinction between state and nonstate journalists as irrelevant. The question of jobs returns, and the youths express their dissatisfaction not with the apparent targets of their rioting, the Mozabites for whom the region has long been home, but with the state. They tell Battuta that, while Algeria lives off oil and gas from the region, Northerners (and thus outsiders) receive all the jobs in those industries. Yet when Battuta affirms the need for their voices to be heard, their leader interjects: “Who do they think we are, zanj?” While it is clear that this apparently casual reference sets Battuta on his quest to learn more about the historical Zanj, the target and intent of the remark are more difficult to parse, as is the exchange that follows it. For, before Battuta can respond, his interlocutor adds, “Our ghosts may wake up,” continuing, to the journalist’s puzzlement, “You can take photos, our ghosts are your (plural) ghosts” (Shibahna shibahkum). With this permission that is also a dismissal of Battuta’s ability to shed light on their riots, to really explain them within dominant national discourse, the youth underscores his, his cohort’s, and even their targets’, nonexistence in official formulations of postindependence Algeria. Yet his statement is also a challenge, one that defies Battuta to begin perceiving other Algerias and alternate kinds of maps.

Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (New Texts Out Now)

Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds (Oakland: UC Press, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book and how does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

Houri Berberian (HB): This book is both a departure and a continuation of my previous work. 

My fascination with revolutions and revolutionaries dates back to my first book, which focused more closely on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution and Armenians, and the latter is something I pursued in shorter essays as well. Although the book indirectly addressed connections and crossings in the triangulated frontier empires of the Russians, Ottomans, and Iranians, it was not its main focus. I continued to develop my interest in early twentieth-century revolutions and revolutionaries and delved into world history in my teaching. Starting in 2008, I was introduced to the possibilities of connected histories, especially in relationship to the history and historiography of Armenians.

The graduate seminar I taught on comparative and connected revolutions in 2012 and the animated discussions we had in that seminar served to cement in my mind the necessity of a connected histories study on revolutions. I became convinced that expanding our lens to explore larger regional and global contexts opens up multiple worlds of richness, possibilities, and interconnections. This book is a product of my deepening commitment to excavating and examining the myriad connections and the meaningful ways in which those connections shape lives and histories, ties that may seem invisible at first, until we look closely and realize how ubiquitous and powerful they are.

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

HB: This book explores the connectedness of the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian revolutions by using the case of Armenian revolutionaries. The three revolutions coincided with revolutions in Portugal (1910), Mexico (1911), and China (1912). The revolutions in the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian states drew strength from each other’s successes and attempted to effect change in their own particular environments. In all cases, but in varying degrees, these upheavals all involved, to some extent, the collaboration of linguistically and ethnically diverse imperial subjects and the adaptation of European Enlightenment ideas, as well as socialism in its many variants.

The book looks at the prevalent crisscrossing or circulation of Armenian activists, arms, and print through these revolutions and across the South Caucasus, Asia Minor, and Iran, as well as Europe, within the context of transformations in transportation and communication. It also analyzes the weight of ideas—like constitutionalism, federalism, and socialism—all of which filtered through the frontiers via revolutionaries and workers, as well as circulars and newspapers, and were adapted to or indigenized under local conditions.

I apply two key approaches to the study of these revolutions and Armenians that are both novel and absolutely crucial in understanding them. First, I employ a connected histories and—what I call—a “connected revolutions” approach, which I apply to the study of our three revolutions. By connected histories, I mean a systematic exploration of the circulation of ideas, individuals, and objects, and—in our case of Armenian revolutionaries—arms, print, and global ideologies. It is substantially different from comparative history in that it considers ideas, people, and objects not merely in relation to one another but through one another, in terms of relationships, interactions, and circulation. 

Critical to a meaningful understanding of these revolutions is an appreciation of the global context or conjuncture that allows us to see them beyond their regional setting and local particularities and in light of larger transformations.

Second, the study insists on a global approach by focusing on turn-of-the-twentieth-century global transformations that smoothed the road toward revolution and facilitated the circulation of revolutionaries. Critical to a meaningful understanding of these revolutions is an appreciation of the global context or conjuncture that allows us to see them beyond their regional setting and local particularities and in light of larger transformations. The extent of circulation of roving Armenian activists, arms, and global ideas that we witness at the turn of the twentieth century only becomes possible when we consider the role of new technologies like railways and telegraph and the proliferation of periodicals and books, all of which had a powerful effect on revolutionaries taking part in multiple struggles. The period in which these revolutions took place, particularly from the late nineteenth to the early twentieth century, witnessed significant shifts in technologies of global communication and transportation that led to faster and therefore more frequent travel (by railway and steamship) and communication (by telegraph) across wider distances, thus shrinking the time it took to get to places near and far and giving the impression that the world had become smaller because it had become more easily accessible (David Harvey’s time-space compression). At the same time, the world seemed to expand because these same technologies made available a range of ideas, encounters, and exchanges, thus magnifying the available and reachable horizons. This two-pronged consequence of time-space compression, shrinking and expanding, was instrumental in connecting our revolutions because it made possible the circulation of revolutionary operatives and intellectuals as well as the ideas and ideologies that fuelled those revolutions.

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

HB: I hope the book will reach a wide academic and lay audience, but I suspect scholars and students will get most from the book, particularly those who are interested in world history, the history of revolutions, as well as the history of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, of the South Caucasus, and more specifically of Armenians. I would be very pleased, of course, if it had a broad impact on a number of fields, disciplines and across academic and lay audiences and changed the way we think about and study revolutions and non-dominant groups, such as the Armenians, with a focus on connectivity rather than insularity or comparison.

J: What other projects are you working on now?

HB: I am currently preparing an essay about Armenian revolutionary Rubina who helped plan and herself attempted the assassination of Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II in 1905. The study explores the portrayal of Rubina by contemporaries and others, which has produced a highly gendered narrative at the cost of appreciating her truly revolutionary role–not only in the conventional sense but also revolutionary in terms of her gender. This essay will appear as a chapter in Age of Rogues: Rebels, Revolutionaries and Racketeers in Turn of the Century Eurasia Minor, edited by Ramazan Hakki Oztan & Alp Yenen (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021) but is also part of a larger book project I am planning on late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Armenian revolutionaries’ use of political violence, from attempted assassinations of government officials to traitors and informers. In addition to exploring the local and regional circumstances of such acts, the study will also place these operations within the larger context of global terror tactics, including the closest examples from the Russian Empire, and examine them and their practitioners as part of a global transformation in political movements, organizations, and tactics.

J: What conclusions would you like readers to draw from your book?

HB: I would like readers to appreciate the importance of studying these three revolutions through connections and within their local, regional as well as broader global context. My engagement with a connected histories approach is in direct contrast to a comparative method which invariably privileges one side. So, I hope that readers will appreciate the novel application of this methodological model particularly in the case of the MENA region.

With the study, I would also like readers to recognize the significance of studying the place of less well-represented and little-studied peoples like the Armenians and to bring them out of the marginality they have at times inscribed for themselves—and others have inscribed for them—to foreground histories often hidden by national and nationalist approaches. In many ways, Armenians’ participation in three revolutions, their journeys across and within imperial frontiers, and their experimentation with global ideologies make them ideal subjects for grasping the connections between these early twentieth-century revolutions. Armenians were only one of many groups that, through their mobility, acted as connectors in history; for that reason, they should be viewed as one part of a larger whole within the wider regional and global context.  However, they are also a unique group for investigation because they prepared for all the movements and participated in varying degrees in all three revolutions.

Last but not least, it is crucial for us to comprehend why they did so. They did so because they believed that the fate of the Armenian populations living in all three empires would benefit from revolutionary change and the promise of greater representation, social and economic justice, harmonious coexistence, and equality of all citizens. Therefore, the wider participation and collaboration in these revolutionary and constitutional movements must also be seen as part and parcel of the more limited Armenian struggle in the Ottoman and Russian Empires, as the campaigns and their participants were intertwined and informed by each other. Our revolutionaries saw the movements as connected and part of the same fight and, therefore, so should we. 

 

Excerpt from the book

In October 1908 a full-page illustration appeared on the last page of the Armenian-language satirical weekly, Khatabala (Trouble), in Tiflis. It features a simplified depiction of the Ottoman Empire arched by a banner-like rainbow that reads “CONSTITUTION.” The backdrop is a cloudy, stormy sky. The seas are dark and tempestuous. Below the rainbow, in the center of the empire, stands a man identified as a Turk, with his back to the reader/viewer, holding a banner that proclaims “Unity, Equal[ity].” On his right, from the top, with expressions and postures that vary from attentiveness to ennui, are men identified as Kurd, Armenian (in red), Bedouin, Arab, and Jew. They hold banners that say “Autonomy,” but only the Armenian’s banner is upright. The others brush the ground. All except the Arab (depicted as black) and the Bedouin, both of whom are armed, are on their knees in submission or supplication. The Armenian’s posture, however, appears somewhat different than that of the other kneeling Ottoman subjects. His outstretched arms, along with his gaze, seem to be directed across Anatolia toward the Balkans, perhaps with respect or in support. In the Balkans, from right to left, are those identified as Albanian, Macedonian, and Greek. Between the Albanian and the Macedonian, standing slightly in the background, is an older, white-bearded, and rather meek man, who is not identified. These figures all hold banners of autonomy and are standing; the Macedonian and the Greek, however, hold rather agitated poses, with their banners unfurled in the air. The caption to the illustration is a poem: 

Թող շողշողուն ծիածան                          Այս «նշանով հաշտութեան»

Ձեզ շաղկապէ, հէք ազգեր                      Թող դարման են ձեր վէրքեր

May the resplendent rainbow             With this “sign of conciliation”
Conjoin you, poor nations                  May they remedy your wounds

How are we to interpret this illustration? How could this satirical portrayal of constitution and the relationship of the empire’s ethnicities to it reflect a real and complicated relationship with constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire? Could it also perhaps even help us understand the contrasting Armenian views toward constitutionalism, in general, and toward specific constitutions in the Russian and Iranian states, as well as views on autonomy, unity, and equality? The Armenians’ complex relationship with constitutionalism is not unique to that concept; rather, it reflects a wider and equally multifaceted affiliation with other prevalent, global ideas and ideologies such as socialism, nationalism, and anarchism, particularly anarchist interpretations of federation, autonomy, and decentralization. Our frontier-crossing revolutionaries who traversed Eurasia in pursuit or in support of revolutionary transformation in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Empires were also boundary crossers—that is, they navigated not only geographical expanses but also the world of global ideas and ideologies. They experimented, adopted, adapted, and even synthesized concepts and world visions according to the actual circumstances in which they lived and their own particular interests and aspirations. Their disagreements and debates over constitutionalism, federation and decentralization, and socialism and the national question in many ways mirror the disputes taking place contemporaneously among European (understood in its broadest and most extensive sense) leftists. They also reflect or are part of larger trends in the region, as the discussion in this and the following chapter demonstrate by drawing parallels when germane, especially with Georgians, Bulgarians, and Macedonians. This chapter and the next rely heavily on revolutionary Armenian-language periodicals and a number of books published in the revolutionary period by intellectuals and activists in the Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian Empires and in Europe. They represent the vibrant array of ideological and political leanings.

. . .

In this chapter, the focus is on the ways in which and the paths through which ideas moved as well as the ways revolutionaries accommodated and applied them. The chapter returns to the illustration with which it began to discuss constitutionalism’s place in the Armenian revolutionary discourse and then moves to federation, decentralization, and autonomy... This chapter seeks to answer the following questions, which are key to understanding how the circulation of global ideas contributed to connecting triangulated revolutions: How did ideas such as constitutionalism and federation motivate and inspire our revolutionaries? How did the revolutionaries understand these ideas? Which ideologues and theoreticians did they find appealing? In other words, what did they read, with what concepts did they engage, and whom did they reference and translate? How did their personal encounters and exchanges with thinkers in and from Western and Central Europe and Russia, as well as their keen awareness and deep familiarity with international leftist views, movements, publications, and world events, contribute to the mobility of ideas and revolutionaries’ ideological boundary crossings? How did they adapt ideas or mental constructs to their own reality, link them to their own objectives, and accommodate them to the revolutions for which they fought?

. . .

The illustration with which I began this chapter certainly gives us an idea of the perceptions of different ethnicities in relation to the Ottoman Empire. Even though they are all shown holding the banner of autonomy in response to or to accompany the banner of unity and equality, some seem to be more vehement advocates of autonomy than others. The Armenian is portrayed as somewhere between the aggressive Balkans on one side and the rather apathetic or dispirited Kurd, Bedouin, and Jew on the other. His banner is held high, although he himself is kneeling. The Turk takes center stage, representing his dominance in the empire’s power structure. Constitution is represented by the rainbow, symbolizing peace, rebirth, and promise. The illustration may be drawing from the story in Genesis, in which a great flood brought on by God to rid the world of humans who have corrupted the world and filled it with violence—an ancient form of man’s inhumanity to man—is followed by a rainbow signifying God’s covenant with man. In Genesis, God vows, “I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth. . . . I have set my bow in the clouds, and it shall be a sign of the covenant between me and the earth. When I bring clouds over the earth and the bow is seen in the clouds, I will remember my covenant that is between me and you and every living creature of all flesh.” Following Genesis, if we understand the rainbow of constitution as a symbol of that covenant and covenant as “a formal agreement . . . between a superior and inferior party, the former ‘making’ or ‘establishing’ the bond with the latter,” then we can make sense of all the illustration’s symbolism, including the stormy clouds menacingly looming behind the rainbow. The constitution represents a covenant and a promise between the “superior” Ottoman state and its subjects not to rain violence upon them and instead to usher in a new period of unity and equality. The response of the “inferior” parties seems demoralized, hopeful, skeptical, or indignant. The poem, too, rings a note of promise and expresses a wish to “conjoin” with “conciliation” and to “remedy” past injuries. However, it does so in the context of and perhaps in contrast to competing visions or understandings of constitution. 

The illustration no doubt represents a complex, newly constitutional Ottoman world. It also, however, opens a way for us to comprehend the rather nuanced relationship of Armenians to the period’s global craze of constitutionalism in three empires and revolutionary movements. Much has been written about the impact of the concept of constitutionalism on Russians, Iranians, and Ottomans.

. . . 

The overwhelmingly positive view, not only throughout this region but also around the world, dominated the discourse on constitution and the aspirations of people worldwide.

Constitutionalism as an idea, a goal, and an actualized model had wide reach. News of constitutional struggles as well as pamphlets and books about constitutionalism circulated not only through telegraphy and print but also frontier-crossing revolutionaries who benefitted from the other turn-of-the-century marvels, the steamship and railroad. Thus, the idea of constitutionalism and its devotees connected revolutions at home and afar. Armenians pursued and sought constitution in all three empires: Russian, Ottoman, and Iranian. Some activists and thinkers, however, had mixed feelings about the reality or practical application of constitution, even if they espoused its principle and promise. This should not be construed as a rejection or ambivalence about the significance of constitution; on the contrary, they attached so much importance to it and the multiple problems it could resolve that they worried about the kind of constitution being supported or established.

_____________________________


This article is part of the new Jadaliyya Iran Page launch. To inaugurate the Iran Page, its co-editors are pleased to present the following articles, interviews, and resources:

Articles

"Jadaliyya Launches New Iran Page" by Iran Page Editors

"Covering Race and Rebellion" by Naveed Mansoori

"The Systemic Problem of 'Iran Expertise' in Washington" by Negar Razavi

Media Roundup

Extended Iran Media Roundup

New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) Interviews

Houri Berberian, Roving Revolutionaries: Armenians and the Connected Revolutions in the Russian, Iranian, and Ottoman Worlds

Nile Green, The Persianate World: The Frontiers of a Eurasian Lingua Franca

Narges Bajoghli, Iran Reframed: Anxieties of Power in the Islamic Republic

Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, Revolution and its Discontents: Political Thought and Reform in Iran

Golbarg Rekabtalaei, Iranian Cosmopolitanism: A Cinematic History

Peyman Vahabzadeh, A Rebel’s Journey: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan and Revolutionary Theory in Iran

Resources

Engaging Books Series: Cambridge University Press Selections on Cosmopolitanism and Political Reform in Iran

Jadaliyya Talks: Arash Davari and Sina Rahmani on "Divorce, Iran-America Style"

"Essential Readings: Post-Revolutionary Iran" by Arang Keshavarzian