On March 26, 2021 the Centers for Middle East Studies at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as part of the yearlong collaborative project “Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World,” held a roundtable titled “Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking.”
December 17, 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. Beginning in 2011, mass uprisings swept North Africa and the Middle East, spreading from the shores of Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and the Eastern Province of the Arabian Peninsula. In more recent years, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq also experienced mass protests and uprisings, some of which are ongoing. The persistence of demands for popular sovereignty even in the face of re-entrenched authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and civil strife is a critical chapter in regional and global history. In an effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on protests, revolutions, and uprisings, this roundtable addressed the relationship between archives, historical thinking, and revolution—both past and present.
The scholars gathered here reflect on the relationships between archives, revolution, and historical thinking. Traversing Syria from 1925 to 2011, Reem Bailony navigates revolt and rebellion past and present to reveal how archives sustain revolution beyond the narrow confines of success and failure. Reflecting on her research on Saudi Arabia as well as the social, economic, political, and infrastructural collapse in twenty-first century Lebanon, Rosie Bsheer poses hope and hopelessness as essential categories of analysis. Putting Revolution 1 (1968) in conversation with Revolution 2 (2021), Muriam Haleh Davis unfolds archives as spaces of constructing, destroying, and rebuilding self, state, and sovereignty. Traveling through the punctured, condensed, and elongated times and spaces of uprising, Pascale Ghazaleh narrates revolution and counterrevolution through archival access and practice in Egypt. Traces the Iraqi scholar Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani, Sara Pursley exits the nation-state’s temporal and spatial confines to uncover otherwise hidden ideas, sensibilities, and strategies of anticolonial revolution. Participating in the Lebanese uprising of 2019 and witnessing the country’s collapse in 2020-21, Nadya Sbaiti invites us to bring our emotions more explicitly into our archival readings of violence, of the threat of massacre, of the imaginings of a better future. Finally, Naghmeh Sohrabi, although not joining us on March 26, graces our pages here. Detailing a brief post-revolutionary window in 1979 Iran, when rebels where wresting control of SAVAK archives, she narrates revolution and historical thinking as a curiosity to know one’s own life, those trivial details captured in what she calls “bureaucratic life-keeping.”
Read the Articles in the Roundtable Here:
- Rosie Bsheer, Historicizing Hope/lessness in Revolutionary Times
- Reem Bailony, Archives as Repositories of Resistance: Syrian Uprisings Past and Present
- Muriam Haleh Davis, The Algerian Archive between Two Revolutions
- Pascale Ghazaleh, An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021
- Sara Pursley, “Secrets of Revolution”: Iraq and the Global 1919
- Nadya Sbaiti, Archive as Sensorium: 2021 in 1940 and 1940 in 2021
- Naghmeh Sohrabi, In Search of Iran’s Revolutionary Archives