Workshop
»Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries«
Program:
https://tinyurl.com/57sytkdr
Convened by Alexandros Lamprou (Research Fellow, Philipps-Universität Marburg), Esther Möller (Centre March Bloch), Rim Naguib (EUME Fellow of the Gerda Henkel Foundation 2024/25), and Georges Khalil (Forum Transregionale Studien / EUME).
Venue: Centre Marc Bloch (Friedrichstraße 191, 10117 Berlin)
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The Middle East and North Africa are connected to Europe and other world regions by infrastructures, politics and the mobility of goods, ideas, images, and people. The selective historiography of these connections however is marked by boundaries and uneven power relations and capacities. In recent years, mobility from the South or the East of the Mediterranean northward has been increasingly framed as a concern or problem in European host societies. While there seems to be a consensus among scholars that mobility, migration, and exchange are common and constitutive features of human history everywhere, attention has rarely been paid to the long history of inverse movements of people from Europe southward and eastward, to North Africa and the Middle East.
Our workshop aims to look at the MENA region as a destination and space for Diasporas, Exiles, Migrants, and Refugees from Europe. This approach may contribute to a more nuanced assessment of the movements of people, and how they have reciprocally affected and shaped societies, economies, cultures, and thought, not only in the Middle East and North Africa but also in Europe. In contrast to the hegemonic political and media discourses and much of the scholarly literature on migration, that have tended to uncritically think of population movements in unidirectional terms – from the ‘Global South’ to the ‘Global North’ – we wish to reflect on the mobility of people from Europe towards the South and East, in the context of European colonialism, economic crises, political upheavals and wars, and to propose a reflexive approach to the study of human mobility in search of safety, freedom, and a better life.
The aim of this workshop is to bring together strands of research that have rarely been in conversation with each other due to scholarly and institutional arrangements that separate between specific areas of the world (such as the Middle East or North Africa) and systematic questions addressed from specific European or national locations as universal. Drawing on current approaches in global, transnational history and (post)colonial studies, we invite scholars to critically engage with (methodological) nationalism in the study of migration and displacement, exile or diaspora in historical and conceptual ways.
In connecting geographies and questions habitually thought of as separate, this workshop is intended as an invitation to think about how historical, spatial, cultural or conceptual imaginations of the nation and its fragments, regions and their boundaries, have been subverted or transformed by the movements of people from Europe who went to, lived in, or passed through North Africa and the Middle East. What potential might a decolonial approach to the questions of diaspora, exile, migration and refuge offer, and how does it challenge our understanding of areas or regions like West- or Eastern Europe, Near- and Middle East, or North Africa?
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Participants: Melissa Altinsoy (U of Cambridge), Riadh Ben Khalifa (U of Tunis / MECAM Fellow 2024/25), Natalie Bernstien (UC, Los Angeles), Marie Bossaert (U Clermont Auvergne), Lucia Carminati (U of Oslo), Gülnur Demirci (Malmö U / U of Groningen), Paulina Dominik (European U Institute), Zeynep Ertuğrul (EHESS / HU Berlin), Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky (UC, Santa Barbara / EUME Fellow of the AvH 2025-26), Julia Hauser (U Kassel / FU Berlin), Erkjad Kajo (Aix-Marseille U), Jeffrey G. Karam (LAU), İlkay Kirişçioğlu (Sapienza U di Roma), Nazan Maksudyan (Centre Marc Bloch), Roy Marom (Van Leer Jerusalem Institute), Enes Niziplioğlu (Ruhr U Bochum), Timur Saitov (Binghamton U), Karène Sanchez-Summerer (U of Groningen), Abel Solans (CHSP), Avinoam Stillman (FU Berlin), Annalaura Turiano (CNRS, IREMAM / CMB), Yair Wallach (SOAS London), and Sebastian Willert (Simon Dubnow Institute).
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