Nora Lafi just published (Open Access): “Conceptualising Urbanity, Reinterpreting Coexistence: A ḥisba Manuscript of the Late Ottoman Era in Tunis”, in Religion and Urbanity Online, edited by Susanne Rau and Jörg Rüpke, Berlin-Boston, De Gruyter, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/urbrel.11276311
This work was prepared during her stay at Max Weber Kolleg (Universität Erfurt) as a Senior Research Fellow in 2020.
Attitudes of the Turkish Guest Workers towards Democratic Participation in Trade Unions and Companies: Evidence from the Migrant Associations in Cologne and Frankfurt until the Recruitment Ban (1973)”
March 14, 2022. 16h00-18h00 (Berlin Time). Registration: https://forms.gle/A8AJDvdaQyUiG5qD8
Abstract:
The period (1961-1973) of the Turkish guest workers in Federal Germany is a topic of a large literature, but not much light has been shed on the disagreements and even conflicts among worker organisations about labour activism and democratic participation in trade unions and production processes. If anything, in the early 1960s Turkish workers massively gathered under trade unions, even at a time when guest workers’ rights had been of secondary importance in trade unions. Based on the archival material published by the worker associations in Cologne and Frankfurt, the paper discusses the key attitudes raised within the early Turkish associations towards how to engage German trade unions and work councils at companies individually and in the organisational form. In brief, the legal framework about the temporary work in Germany, trade unions’ positions, and nationalist forces consolidated in Turkish governments and bureaucracy underpinned conflicting disputes about the idea of democratic participation through labour activism.
Dr. Caner Tekin is a researcher at the Institute for Social Movements of the Ruhr University Bochum (RUB), where he leads the project “History of the Turkish Migrant Organisations in Comparison” funded by the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung. He received his doctor title at RUB in 2020. He worked previously as postdoctoral fellow at the Georg-Eckert Institute for Textbook Research and as teaching fellow at the RUB Centre for Mediterranean Studies. He authored the Book “Debating Turkey in Europe: Identities and Concepts” (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020), edited a recent volume of the Journal Moving the Social (No:65/2021) and co-edited (with Stefan Berger) the volume “History and Belonging: Representations of the Past in Contemporary European Politics” (New York: Berghahn Books, 2018).
Next session: April 25, 2022
Full 2020-2021-2022 programme of the HISDEMAB seminar
On March 11, 17h00 (Berlin time), Nora Lafi presents (in Arabic) (together with Suaad Alghafal) a paper on this topic in the framework of the international conference on Libyan History organized online by the University of Derna.
On March 3-5, 2022, Nora Lafi participates in the international conference “The Presence and Absence of the Past“, organized by Çiçek İlengiz, Annika Kirbis, Jelena Radovanović, Jeremy F. Walton in the framework of the activities of the Max Planck Research Group “Empires of Memory: The Cultural Politics of Historicity in Former Habsburg and Ottoman Cities. I am part, together with Karen Barkey, Chris Hann, David Henig and Steve Vertovec of a session entitled “Afterlives of difference”.
On March 2, 2022 at 16.00, Nora Lafi will participate in the kick-off event of the Launch Series of the Routledge Handbook of EU-Middle East Relations. In this first section, the co-editors Dimitris Bouris, Daniela Huber and Michelle Pace will discuss Entanglements in EU-Middle East Relations. After that, the different Authors will tackle the historical context of these multi-faceted relations and its legacy. Senem Aydin Düzgit & Bahar Rumelili will demonstrate how representations of the other and the self were linked to political events pertaining to Europe and the Ottoman Empire. Then, Roberto Mazza will talk about the impact of French and British colonialism in the Middle East and North Africa. Finally, Nora Lafi will focus on “Longue Durée” reflections on anti-colonial movemnets in the Middle East from 1798 until today. For more info and to register, please visit here.
Between Elections and Constitution: ‘the people’ as body politic (1943-1963)
Februar 07, 2022. 16h00-18h00 (Berlin Time). Registration: https://forms.gle/A8AJDvdaQyUiG5qD8
Abstract:
Government from the people, to the people is a common assumption of what democracy is. However, very few historical examples depict democratic systems by putting the people in the institutions. On the contrary, representative systems pretended to address the issue of bringing the people in. In Iraq and Syria from 1946 to 1958, these issues animated intense debates of “who” the people was. This presentation explores how both parliamentary systems and their leaders questioned the notion of people as body politic. Their discussions reframed the very base of sovereign people in both countries. Certainly it was a gender issue but several other criteria led representatives to develop discourses whom has to vote and who could enter the parliament. From this perspective, representative system was not a static regime. On the contrary, a tension animated the debates and the votes.
Matthieu Rey is currently director of contemporary studies at IFPO. He graduated at EHESS Paris in 2013. He is the author of numerous books and papers on the question of parliamentarism in the Middle East, and particularly in Iraq in the 1950s. In a 2012 article he analyzed election processes in 1954 in Iraq and Syria. His research focused on mechanisms of protest and moblization with, for example, a 2010 paper: “La Wathba: manifester en Irak en 1948“. Matthieu Rey developed an attention to the scale of neighbourhoods too with a 2013 chapter on Syria: “La révolte des quartiers: territorialisation plutôt que confessionalisation“. He also studied the impact of the Cold War on local politics in the Middle East with “Domestiquer la Guerre froide au Moyen-Orient” and “‘Fighting colonialism’ versus ‘non- alignment’: two Arab points of view on the Bandung Conference” as well as the interaction between international organizations and the region: “How Did the Middle East Meet the West? The International United Nations Agencies’ Surveys in the 1950s“. With Laura Ruiz de Elvia he published in 2020 the paper “Luttes de sens“, on the question of the wording of politics in a revolutionary context.
His newest book, When Parliaments ruled the Middle East: Iraq and Syria (1946-1963) is published in 2022 by The American University in Cairo Press.
Next session: March 14, 2022
Full 2020-2021-2022 programme of the HISDEMAB seminar
« Reflexions on the historicity of Democracy : Libya in the longue durée »
تأملات في تاريخية الديمقراطية : ليبيا عبر التاريخ
January 25-26, 2022 (Online) International Workshop organized by Suaad Al Ghafal and Nora Lafi
Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient, Berlin. Workshop organized within the framework of the HISDEMAB international and collaborative research programme of the Leibniz-Association
Registration: HISDEMAB@gmail.com
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Programme here
“The Jews of Alexandria: middle class feelings, urban identity and politics, 1880s-1920s”
January 17, 2022. 16h00-18h00 (Berlin Time). Registration: https://forms.gle/A8AJDvdaQyUiG5qD8
Abstract:
Based on a ‘close reading’ of documents from the archives of the Alliance Israélite Universelle (Paris), the Central Archives for the History of the Jewish People (Jerusalem) and from articles found in newspapers published in Egypt in the colonial and early monarchic years, this lecture will look at the consolidation of a middle class Alexandrian Jewish identity and its relation to urban politics and sociability in the period that goes from the early 1880s to the mid-1920s. The lecture will discuss the multiple connections that Alexandrian Jews had with the city in which they lived and its socio-political environment, as well as the ways in which its burgeoning Jewish middle class tried to find a place of its own for example by founding schools, hospitals and cultural associations. At the same time, it will also look at the different levels of involvement – or lack thereof – that the Jews could have at local and national level in terms of deliberative practices, debates on political representation and party politics, depending on their socio-economic role, national origin and gender and to what extent this made them feel part of a shared Alexandrian and/or Egyptian public sphere. The aim is to consider Alexandria as a laboratory of (semi-colonial) modernity, at the crossroad of contrasting Ottoman legacies and European models of identity, where people, ideas – from anti-Jewish feelings to Egyptian nationalism and Zionism – and goods circulated and contributed to the making of a diverse, and yet ephemeral, bourgeois imaginary.
Dario Miccoli is assistant professor of Modern Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the Department of Asian and North African Studies, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice and member of the board of AISG – Italian Association of Jewish Studies. His research and publications deal with the contemporary history and memory of the Jews of Egypt and the Mediterranean, and Mizrahi Israeli literature. He is the author of Histories of the Jews of Egypt: An Imagined Bourgeoisie, 1880s-1950s (2015) and La letteratura israeliana mizrahi (2016). His new monograph A Sephardi Sea: Jewish Memories Across the Mediterranean is forthcoming for Indiana University Press.
Next session: February 07, 2022: Matthieu Rey
Full 2020-2021-2022 programme of the HISDEMAB seminar
Nora Lafi just published the chapter “Longue-Durée Reflections on Anti-Colonial Movements in the Middle-East (1798–today)” in The Routledge Handbook of EU-Middle East Relations, edited by Dimitris Bouris, Daniela Huber and Michelle Pace (2022)
Habib Kazdaghli Hisdemab Senior Team Member just published تونس زمن الكورونا: يوميات [Tunis in Times of Corona: a Chronicle], Tunis, Dar Nuquch al-Arabia, 2021.
Here a review in Le Maghreb Newpaper.
