TIME
6:10PM
Monday, April 20

VENUE
Scheps Library, Room 457,
Department of Anthropology
Schermerhorn Extension

This talk examines the formation of “nakba” as a concept of disaster and a social practice of catastrophic ideation in Arabic. Contrary to the prevailing assumption, the genealogy of nakba does not begin in 1948 Palestine; it stretches far back into the Ottoman past. I trace nineteenth-century constructions, when nakba referred to medieval episodes of downfall, and examine how Arab publics later redeployed them during the Hamidian massacres (1894-97), the Armenian/Assyrian Genocide (1915), and colonial wars, including the Great Syrian Revolt (1925) and the Great Arab Revolt (1936-39). These events entrenched a structure of the imagination that enmeshed nakba with social formation and political action, in echo with a wider conceptual landscape of catastrophe. I then turn to 1948 Palestine, when the Nakba prompted Arab social scientists to redefine selfhood, sovereignty, and objectivity. This stratified pre-1948 genealogy reveals how catastrophic ideation generated sites of memory and practices of oblivion across Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, and English since the nineteenth-century onward.

Adrien Zakar is Assistant Professor in the Near and Middle East Civilizations Department and the Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology at the University of Toronto. His writings have appeared in the International Journal of Middle East Studies; Anthropology Today; Transbordeur; the International Journal of Turkish Studies; Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; and the American Historical Review. Zakar is currently working on a manuscript tracing the history of vision and modern mapping in the late Ottoman Empire and in interwar Lebanon and Syria.