Unusual Figures: Race, Empire and Unseeing the Global Middle East
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“Unusual Figures” tracks the lives of several figures whose experiences shed light on the complex ways Middle Eastern identities have been lived, imagined, and negotiated across the long twentieth century. At first glance, the “unusual figures” I analyze come from very different backgrounds: Calouste Gulbenkian was an Ottoman Armenian oil financier who lived most of his life in Europe; Aliya Hassen was a mid-century Muslim American activist from the Midwest; Palestinian American Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century; and Lebanese Colombian Shakira Mebarak is a global pop music phenomenon. However, drawing on personal papers, multinational corporate archives, popular culture and government documents, I show how these four lives, both singly and together, inhabit the global racial projects that construct “the Middle East” and its peoples in complex and often deeply problematic ways. Utilizing a micro-historical methodology organized around multiple sites, the project’s biographies identify dialectical relationships between the overdetermined ways these figures are seen and unseen, versus how the figures imagined themselves. Resisting declensionist and oversimplified narratives of assimilation, I demonstrate the endurance of MENA networks even in the tiny space accorded them under the crushing weight of imperial formations. Moreover, I use these figures to trace the evolving and often incoherent definitions and deployment of the “Middle East” in popular and academic discourse.
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