Levantine chronotopes: prisms for entangled histories

Contemporary Levant ISSN: 2058-1831 (Print) 2058-184X (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycol20 Levantine chronotopes: prisms for entangled histories Rana Issa & Einar Wigen To cite this article: Rana Issa & Einar Wigen (2020) Levantine chronotopes: prisms for entangled histories, Contemporary Levant, 5:1, 1-12, DOI: 10.1080/20581831.2019.1710666 To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2019.1710666 Published online: 31 Mar 2020. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 161 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ycol20 CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 2020, VOL. 5, NO. 1, 1–12 https://doi.org/10.1080/20581831.2019.1710666 EDITORIAL Levantine chronotopes: prisms for entangled histories Rana Issaa and Einar Wigenb a Department of English, American University of Beirut, Beirut, Lebanon; bDepartment of Culture Studies and Oriental Languages, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway ABSTRACT KEYWORDS Like all contested concepts, the term ‘Levant’ is unstable. Both its academic and political uses are geographically and historically fairly loose and illdefined. This geo-historical instability makes room for the multiplicity of chronotopes that the contributors lay out in this special issue. In order to bring these contributions together, we also use the theoretical concept of the chronotope, the way that authors and actors under study bring together time and space in their legitimation of political efforts in the present. The chronotopes treated here have far-reaching implications in our experience and knowledge of the Levant. With Bakhtin’s chronotopic method, we approach the region through its entangled history, taking people’s mobility, their composite identities, and the major transformations in their lives as the central concern for analysis. Concept of Levant; chronotopes; entangled history; Bakhtin; Arab-Israeli literature; temporality; conceptual history; contested concepts The Levant is a nebulous region. Historically, it has been a site of entanglement where native concerns and cultures have been mobilised into a global arena through transhistorical processes of cultural, economic, and political exchange. In this special issue, we argue that taking ‘the Levant’ or ‘alMashriq’ outside its usage in identity politics, as a basis for bringing different lines of inquiry together, enables us to ask new questions and combine comparative and entangled approaches to the region. This way, the contributions inquire into how the Levant, both as a region and as a concept, was shaped through a history of human mobility and dynamic cultural transformations. Examining the discursive practices that continue to shape the region – or parts of it – as well as reflecting on the current methods we use to perform our scholarly work when studying it, we turn to the contestations over concepts and chronotopes that have shaped critical thinking about the Levant since the nineteenth century. The articles reflect on the Levant as a site of change and cultural upheaval that has been formed through millennia of human mobility. As a historical route for trade, imperial ambition, religious pilgrimage, and intellectual exchange, the Levant has inspired diverging narratives that commonly build upon its history of dynamic cultural transformations. Approaching the history of Levantine cultures and societies requires a methodology that attends to the entangled histories of the various communities in the region.1 Bringing these entangled histories together under a common regional heading, rather than parsing them according to a nation-state methodology, has a number of analytical benefits. Most significantly, this approach highlights both the interconnectedness of the Levant and the sharedness of historical experiences that have shaped contemporary culture, socio-political fabric in similar ways. Unfortunately, to the extent that such regional history has been written, assumptions about the Levant’s cosmopolitanism, multilingualism, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious societies have been the framework rather than the object of analysis. Like the Mediterranean, a concept that Veli N. Yashin (2014) brought to critical CONTACT Einar Wigen einar.wigen@ikos.uio.no © 2020 Council for British Research in the Levant 2 R. ISSA AND E. WIGEN attention through a prismatic analysis as a mode of thought and a narrative construct, the concept of the Levant has ordered certain modes of intellectual discourses that are tied to legacies of Orientalism and imperialism. Deploying Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981) analytical concept of the chronotope – how configurations of time and space are represented in discourse – as a prism through which to write histories of the Levant, this special issue argues for a more fluid approach to the localities of the Levant. It achieves this fluidity by exploring narratives that give form to processes of identity constructions. Through the chronotope, this special issue attends to the contingencies of temporal and spatial categories of the region. The Levantine chronotopes are configurations of relations and narratives studied in a dynamic context where social boundaries and relations are continuously redrawn and re-entangled, and where the overriding assumption is not about unchanging identities but rather about how identity narratives take shape within the spatial and temporal constructions of the Levant. The chronotope opens a way to critically address the treatment of Levantine identities as constants in histories that accept as assumptions the nationalist marshalling of borders between the peoples of the region. As we claim, a focus on chronotopes allows us to analyse the narratives people tell about themselves. We find models for such types of analysis in a number of works about the region. Fernand Braudel’s classic on the Mediterranean (1949) and Timothy Mitchell’s seminal history of Egypt provide good examples of time–space analysis despite their shortcomings in attending to local agency (1991). We learn from them and propose that a longue durée methodology combined with an interest in the ‘techno-scientific transformations’ of globalisation potently reveals the productivity of a multi-temporal approach to the history of the region. More recently, works such as Ilham Khuri-Makdisi’s The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism (2010) historicise the spatial entanglements of global non-state networks and movements that converged across the region in the nineteenth century, in work that deprovincialises the region and shows its centrality to an entangled history of globalisation. Nagihan Haliloğlu (2017) explicitly uses a chronotopic method when arguing that Evliya Çelebi legitimised Ottoman rule over vast regions of the Mediterranean by unifying the geography through mythologies and historical narrations in his canonical Seyahatname (Travels). In literature, the work of Syrian-Saudi writer Abdul Rahman Munif (1975) on Eastern Mediterranean prisons draws similarities between Levantine state panopticon terror that not only shows how the method of rule is the same regardless of the ideology or the ethnicity of the state, but also that the Levantines share a history of discipline that produced in them very similar types of citizens. A chronotopic approach to the Levant permits a historiographical alternative to Philip Mansel’s nostalgic tales of cosmopolitanism and nationalism in his book Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (2010), and its literary counterpart in the nostalgic curation of Levantine literature in Franck Salameh’s The Other Middle East (2017). It also serves to move beyond the derision that permeates Albert Hourani’s usage of the term which he associated with the depoliticised rich classes that slavishly worked for the colonial powers (1947). It also moves away from the use of sectarian categories as historical constants as in Hisham Sharabi’s intellectual history of the Levant, Arab Intellectuals and the West (1999). Rather, we argue that the Levant has emerged as a concept that delineates a shared history of domination as well as struggle that cut across national borders. These contradictory histories can be analysed conceptually, through an examination of the terms that competed for the definition of this region. This introduction does three things. Firstly, it fleshes out the conceptual history of the Levant. It then ties the history of the concept to the dominant chronotopes of the Levant as they have been produced in scholarship dealing with the question of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Finally, we argue that Levantine chronotopes are used in contemporary discursive struggles and have real consequences for the dynamics of political conflicts that continue to rage in the region today. The chronotope, as a taxonomic organisation of spatial and temporal multiplicities, methodologically enables a focus on historical narratives of the Levant outside the area studies paradigm that has been prevalent so far. Instead, we expand on Hayden White’s interest in how ‘the mode of emplotment chosen to make of the story told a story of a particular kind.’ (1973, p. 142) Instead of examining CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 3 style as White does, we deploy Bakhtin’s narrative theory not to limit ourselves to literary archetypes, but to provide a catalogue of narrative modes whose coordinates entangled in time and space and propose a radical coevalness among different groups that have been historically antagonistic and deeply formative of one another. Building on Johannes Fabian’s observations about the temporalisation of cultural difference in what he termed ‘the denial of coevalness’ (1983, pp. 31–33), we deploy the chronotope to insist on the spatial significance of focusing on the region as the site for exploring and reshaping what gets to be studied together beyond comparison.2 This allows us to undermine the temporalisation of cultural difference and of spatial distance which plagues hegemonic knowledge production of the Middle East, and to radically reshape what is studied together beyond comparison. With Bakhtin, we underscore the necessity of writing historiographies that maintain both time and place in flux and indeed attempt to historicise this flux and account for its agents, events and narratives. Thus. we problematise the typical periodisations of the Levant and the coherence such epochs as antiquity or the Mandate period receive in the works of scholars (see Schayegh and Arsan 2015 and Kaufman 2014). Our approach attends to what Helge Jordheim, following Reinhard Koselleck, has termed ‘multiple temporalities’: At any time in history there are elements, words, concepts, institutional structures, or social and political practices that are not “in sync” with each other, because they feature durations, narrative structures, visions of the future or dreams of the past, rhythms, continuities or discontinuities that structure the relationship between past, present, and future in radically different ways (2014, p. 66). Periodisation stifles an awareness of what remains out of sync when certain times are given primacy over others. Chronotopes offer a weak form of periodisation, that moves away from the epochal, without going so far as to paper over the multiple temporalities that are out of sync at any given time or place that we wish to study. It enables a synchronic analysis of the Levant that nevertheless accounts for the synchronicities of the non-synchronous and fleshes out those stories that would otherwise not fit within traditional periodisations. The history of a concept Just as the chronotope is a way of transcending the narrow confines of periodisation and allows us to bring together different temporalities in the same issue, we also seek alternative ways of conceptualising the geographical region under study. Middle Eastern studies, the field that today holds hegemony over scholarly knowledge production of the region, has engaged in extensive critical selfreflection, in part by historicising the concept of the Middle East and its delineation (see e.g., Foilard 2017, Wigen 2019). As we return to below, the concept of ‘the Middle East’ is primarily a concept exogenous to that which it is set up to delineate and describe. This is one of several reasons we would like to move away from this concept and explore what we take to be the more productive grouping-together that is the Levant. Called ‘the Levant’ in English and ‘al-Mashriq’ in Arabic, the region we deal with today includes Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan and parts of Turkey. While most of the inhabitants are Arabic-speaking Muslims, there are significant populations of Jews and Christians. And although the peoples of the region are diverse, they possess a shared history stretching back millennia. The dominant area studies model effectively singles out the Levant’s larger groups, to the detriment of knowledge about its minorities, margins, and historically less eventful times. As early as 2000, a wide academic digital network was set up under the auspices of H-Net, known as H-Levant, created as a forum for exchange about the region that was intended to function as a meeting place for the scholarly discussion of the modern history and culture of the countries of the Eastern Mediterranean. Since then, the Levant has been revived as a central concept for understanding regional dynamics and exchange. It springs from a sensibility that has also inspired histoire croisée – entangled history – which seeks to narrate history not by reference to one hermetic unit, but by reference to the entangled relations that do not respect geographical and political boundaries 4 R. ISSA AND E. WIGEN (Werner and Zimmermann 2006). In the case of the Levant, journals, associations, and area studies institutes have called for a return to this concept in an effort to do exactly this, and to intervene in Eurocentric geo-political definitions of the region, coupled with nation-state ontology. ‘Levant’, ‘Mashriq’, ‘Orient’, ‘the East’, ‘Asia’, and ‘Anatolia’ are all concepts that have to do with the rising sun. Le Levant was the French concept used to translate the Arabic mashriq (‘the rising of the sun’) in the wake of the formalisation of French Ottoman diplomatic relations in the sixteenth century (Oppenheim 2004). Its Arabic equivalent, al-Mashriq, historically referred to the non-Arabic speaking East, specifically to Persia, India, and beyond, in a label that pointed eastward of Mecca (al-Bushārī [990] 2003). In French usage, le Levant is a calque of al-Mashriq that is simply the present participle of the French verb lever (‘to rise’). As such, the Levant is also ‘the Ottoman East’, the complement to the Maghreb (literally, ‘the setting of the sun’). Paradoxically this latter concept does not have a French translation, despite its strong Arabic geo-political significance as a designation for North Africa and the European parts of the Islamic domains in today’s Southern France and in Spain, while in today’s Arabic usage it denotes the Kingdom of Morocco. In English, ‘the Levant’ seems to have begun its life in relation to the Turkey Company, which was chartered by the English Crown in 1581, eventually changing its name to the Levant Company when in 1606 it merged with the English company that traded with the Venetians (Wood [1935] 1964). This company was headquartered in Aleppo, and its boundaries were set primarily by reference to other companies chartered by the English Crown. Since the nearest ones were the Muscovy Company and the East India Company, any potential trade centred on Aleppo – one of several termini for the Eurasian overland trade route that has been called the Silk Road – fell within this company’s catchment area. For readers interested in the history of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Levant is a site that has a history (sometimes bloody, at other times more peaceful) of composite identities and cultures, of peoples that live together and generate organic social, political, and economic dynamics. The historical gaze is often cast with longing at the Levantine belle époque of the late Ottoman and early colonial era, when Jews, Italians, Syro-Lebanese, Armenians, or Turks lived together in peaceful symbiosis. As Philip Mansel puts it: At certain times […] Levantine cities could find the elixir of coexistence, putting deals before ideals, the needs of the city before the demands of nationalism. Like all cities, however, Levantine cities needed an armed force for protection. This could be provided by the Ottoman, British or French army, but not by their own citizens, since they were unwilling to shoot co-religionists. No Levantine city created an effective police force or national guard of its own. The very qualities which gave these cities energy, freedom and diversity, also threatened their existence. No army, no city. (2010, p. 356). Where the Levant for Philip Mansel is connected with a kind of nostalgia for specific cities as arenas for co-existence, Gil Hochberg uses the concept of Levantinism to criticise narrow conceptualisations of what it means to be Israeli: The first and most detailed attempt to define Levantinism and explain the source of the threat was made by the Israeli writer of Iraqi descent Nissim Rejwan, in an essay published in the Jerusalem Post in 1961. The Levant, he writes, is first and foremost a geographical space, yet Levantinism has less to do with geography than with culture: “Levantinism is a cultural [concept] … you can come from the Levant and be the opposite of Levantine: you can hail from Europe and be the epitome of Levantinism.” Levantinism, Rejwan argues, is “a state of mind” brought about by losing possession of one’s own culture and values. Along similar lines, A. H. Hourani suggests that “to be a Levantine is to live in two or more worlds at once, without belonging to either; to be able to go through the external forms … of a certain nationality, religion or culture, without actually possessing it.” Drawing on these words, we can conclude that Levantinism is a state of performing culture: “going through the external forms of culture, without actually possessing them” (Hochberg 2004, p. 220). This ‘criticism’ of cosmopolitanism that Hochberg emphasises is in many ways the cornerstone of anti-semitism, but one which after the foundation of Israel was transposed onto the Israeli of Middle Eastern descent ‘with superficial education who behaves according to false codes of CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 5 politeness and lacks any real culture or spiritual ability’ (Hochberg 2004, p. 221). While there is definitely something to be said for this identity project, it ties in with nostalgia for a cosmopolitan past. The term Levant nevertheless remains unstable, especially because its academic use is loosely bound both geographically and historically. We assert this instability productively and thereby seek to maintain its centrality in our deployment of the term. The Levant is what the novelist Ahdaf Soueif would call a mezzaterra, of value precisely because in it the Levantine tableau comes into being through rearranging the acres and allotments (Soueif 2004). This geohistorical instability is one example of the types of chronotopes that have had far-reaching implications in our experience and knowledge of the Levant. Using Bakhtin’s chronotope as a unifying prism, this special issue takes people’s mobility, their composite identities, and the major transformations in their lives as the central concern for analysis. Competing concepts Identity concepts can often be broken down into endonyms and exonyms, that is, names that we call ourselves (endonyms) versus those that others call us (exonyms). This is linked to Erving Goffman’s (1959) theory of the I versus the me. For communities with ambiguous borders, there is often contention over the connotations and applicability of such concepts. One example would be ‘Constantinople’ versus ‘Istanbul’, which are two different names for the same city, but which would to some extent serve to identify the speaker. No one from Istanbul would ever say they were from Constantinople, unless they were making a (marginal) political point; rather, using ‘Constantinople’ to denote the city would identify the speaker as an outsider. Between closely entangled languages, the differences between such concepts need not be great, but they are nevertheless there (Wigen 2018). In the same manner, endogenous and exogenous concepts have diverging conceptual histories, and thus different meanings, even though the same people may use them. And so it is with the concepts of the Levant. For exonyms to become endonyms – that is, for ‘natives’ to adopt the label that outsiders use for them as self-identification – there has to be a power hierarchy. The imperial centre (such as the United States) would never appropriate the Arabic exonym as a self-identification, while in the case of the states in the Levant, it is not at all unthinkable that they would appropriate exonyms and make them endonyms. In fact, this has to some extent happened, and as we will return to, the reinterpretation of the Arabic concept for East (Mashriq) – from meaning ‘east of Mecca’ to meaning ‘the East’ in relation to a Western European, or possibly North African, observer – is testament to such relations. Grappling with the tension between endonyms and exonyms is therefore one way of approaching the asymmetries of power relations in the Levant. A choice of names and concepts will therefore usually identify the speaker as much as it describes the object that is spoken of. Take for example the related regional concept Sham, a label that coincides to a large extent (but not identically) to the geography we term the Levant. The designation Sham continues even today to give away the identity of the utterance as Arab and Muslim (Al-HajSaleh 2012). Sham, which was an Ottoman province centred on Damascus and conventionally translates better as Greater Syria, captures best the geo-historical interest in the Levant. In the official lexical definition, Sham is the ‘left of Mecca’ and thus in the opposite direction of Yemen, which is toward the ‘right of Mecca’ (Ibn Manz ūr [1290] 1992). Syria is a concept that harks back to Greek, specifically mentioned in the Gospels as part of the Bible’s place of origin. The region received the name Sham after the Islamic conquests and the Byzantine abdication of the land in the seventh century. In classical Islamic geographical literature, the term Sham is considered Islamo-Arabic, while Syria refers to the Byzantine-Christian identity of the region (al-Hamawī [1226] 2003). While Constantinople came into Ottoman hands in the fifteenth century, the Levant, or more accurately Sham, was under Mamluk rule until the Ottomans conquered Sham and Egypt from the Mamluks in 1516–17. 6 R. ISSA AND E. WIGEN This change at the top of the political hierarchy coincided with increased ‘European’ mercantile and cultural contact following France’s access to trade and religious ties with Christians in the region under Ottoman auspices in 1536. The Levant as a concept gathered momentum, especially after the opening of the Levant Company by English merchants. In tandem with English mercantile efforts, the French and Italians are crucial for the rejuvenation of the term. Together with the merchants, diplomats engaged more widely with the region, and there arose an increasingly intense religious exchange between the French and Italian Jesuits with the local Oriental churches. From the sixteenth until the eighteenth century, ‘the Levant’ was a European name used for a region that was of political, economic, and religious cultural interest to them. This region was east of the ‘European’ metropoles. This increased contact with Europe, consequently, Ottoman political interests in facilitating European mobility, led to the rise of the Levantine bourgeoisie that developed mercantile ties with various European fiefdoms (Philipp 2004). European colonial practices in the nineteenth century triggered a new transformation in the concept of the Levant. As Dror Ze’evi has argued, Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 triggered a transformation in the epistemological framework, which, as we claim, impacted the concept of the Levant (Ze’evi 2004). Le Levant was a polite French term that emerged from the period when France established diplomatic ties with the Ottoman Empire, but Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt instated a more aggressive turn in relations with the Ottoman Empire. Indeed, the concept was reinterpreted by reference to this violent turn of events within a relationship of unequal power. In this period, Levantines acquired a reputation amongst Europeans as well as other Ottoman Arabs for being a corrupt class of ethnically diverse, difficult-to-place (non-)Arabs and/or (non-)Muslims hailing from the entire Mediterranean basin (Oppenheim 2004). A Levantine was seen as a hardto-describe individual with composite or liminal identity. This lack of ethnic or religious purity of origins jibed with the modern zeitgeist, when purity of identity and origin were tantamount to patriotic reproduction. Levantines became the object of pejorative stereotypes at a time when the Levant itself was being geo-politically sliced into nation-states under French and British colonial policies. In this new reality, the Levantines threatened the masters’ narratives. The carving out of new national identities required some ideological and geo-cultural groundwork. In the nineteenth century, the influx of Western missionaries of various denominations to the Levant reordered the space in such a way as to restore the narrative of a ‘Biblical land’ crucial to the legitimisation of the missionary enterprise. One of the first regions to give way to this new geo-historical interpretation of the Levantine space was Syria. This term, ‘Syria’, replaced ‘Sham’ in the nineteenth century, and produced new narratives, by locals and foreigners alike – the nationstate is one such narrative. Syria had clear biblical connotations as a Greek loanword and was known in the Arabic tradition as a Christian word. This was another sign of what the historian of nineteenth-century Lebanon Ussama Makdisi (2003) called the emergence of religion as ‘a site for the colonial encounter.’ Yet religion was not the single most important aspect of the shifting Levantine reality, at least not in all the local corners of the region. The Levant as a political designation began to refer to the competing French and British imperial interests in colonising the region. The subsequent emergence of nation-states that went in tandem with the settler-type colonisation of Palestine by Zionist Europeans gave way to an understanding of the people of the Levant as Levantines, those groups of people – perhaps European, perhaps of minority origin, but certainly from the Mediterranean – who had prospering lives in some of the most bustling metropoles of the early twentieth century, such as Cairo, Alexandria, and Istanbul. With the intensification of the hostility between Israel and Egypt and the rest of the neighbouring Arab states, especially after the Six-Day War in 1967, those Levantine communities were driven out of their lands and homes, and the concept of the Levant as a lifestyle that belies modern identarian policies fell dead. Today, the concept of the Levant threatens the status quo, as it runs counter to the nation-state model that ensured the continued political marginalisation of entire Arab populations by Arab dictators and international powers alike. Thus, a return to the concept of the Levant and an attempt to CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 7 explore the histories that are specific to it is also an attempt to understand how those areas that we traditionally study as delimited nation-states are socially more entangled and intertwined than the neatness of modern borders allows. As Arsan and Schayegh’s editorial work shows, even after the emergence of nation state modules in the Levant following the Mandate period, there is a demonstrable need to examine connections and entanglements, and to reconsider why the futures of some states unfolded similarly, and displayed similar structural formations, but also what this model of periodisation neglects as it neatly organises time into an epochal structure. Inasmuch as it is a focus on a particular geography, a historiography of the Levant takes into account the place of the West in the Middle East, and vice versa. Indeed, the Levant has a history where such categories are more entangled and far too complex to be analysed through the categories of national and religious identity that tend to be selected through classical periodisations. Chronotopes of the Levant By returning to Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope (literally ‘time-space’), which Joakim Parslow expands upon in his contribution, the issue seeks to index how competing discourses and representations are rooted in conceptions of time and space. As Bakhtin defines it, the chronotope seeks to explore how ‘time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history’ (Bakhtin 1981, p. 84). By extending Bakhtin’s chronotopic method outside the field of literary theory, we contend that an analysis of political, socio-economic, legal, theological, and cultural discourses in general are inevitably rooted in the way we understand time and space. Literary theory, especially in its philological closeness to its object of analysis, is interested in problems of language, translation and conceptual travels, issues that lie at the heart of the multi-linguistic, assertively untranslatable, and ultimately hybridised cultural and political traditions of the region. With Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, we compare the various forms of historiographic and ideological representations of the Levant and propose new ways of narrating the events that have shaped the life of the region with concepts derived from the regional dynamics we encounter. The Levant as a term has receded as an object of study, in favour of nation-state ontology (such as Hourani 1947) particularly in the wake of twentieth-century anti-imperial movements that paradoxically favoured nation-state commitments as a starting point to call for an exclusionary Arab identity. Across the fence, Israelis have found the Levant an attractive category that reintegrates them within the region, particularly following the historical approaches to the study of Israeli society, through the contributions of such leading academic historians as Avi Shlaim, Ilan Pappe, and in the earlier works of Benny Morris. With these studies, it became possible to question dominant Zionist discourse and open up Israeli identity into its myriad histories. In that climate of introspective questioning of Israeli history, critical voices within Jewish Israeli society identified an urgent need to recollect their Levantine pasts in order to critique the Zionist Ashkenazi narrative advanced by the state and its intellectuals. Predating the work of New Historians, the cultural historian Ella Shohat recuperated the figure of the Arab-Jew, the Mizrahi and the Sephardi, as a prism to unpack and destabilise the existing narratives and counternarratives of Levantine history. As she writes, Zionist historiography pays little attention to the history of the Jews in the Muslim world … When Zionist history does acknowledge what might be termed “Judeo-Islamic history,” it usually organises its narrative around a selected series of violent events, moving from pogrom to pogrom, as evidence of relentless hostility toward Jews in the Arab world, presumed to be analogous to those encountered in Europe. (1999, p. 103) In this context, the concept of the Levant is useful to show the Zionist repression of Arab identity within the fabric of contemporary Israeli society. Palestinian and Jewish Arab Israeli writers have in recent times been the greatest contributors to a critical approach to the study of the Levant that aims at dismantling the essentialist religious identity within the state apparatus in Israel. The Van 8 R. ISSA AND E. WIGEN Leer Institute in Jerusalem has been at the forefront of such sustained critical readings of Israeli society and, in 2011, it began publishing the Journal of Levantine Studies. Despite the welcome critique, their use of the term Levant within Israeli academia remains ambiguous. At its core, the term has yet to be fleshed out and distinguished from the settler colonial contract and its practices of erasing and silencing Arab identity. Equally important is to expand the designation of the Arab to overcome the narrow sense of belonging that it has enabled throughout the pan-Arab ideologies that have circulated since the mid nineteenth century. This volume argues for the Levant’s capacity for inclusion, and it roots the political stakes in histories that entangle while remaining discreet and identifiable chronotopes. New possibilities In one of its iterations, the Levant comes with Levantines – Europeans whose families had lived in Istanbul or Izmir for so long that they identified with the place and its peoples in a rather cosmopolitan way; Maltese, who were Christian subjects of the British Empire and spoke what may be termed a dialect of Arabic; and the ‘Oriental’ Jews who were of Arab origin, or even the so-called Arab shwams who settled in Cairo and Alexandria during different periods in modern history. In a sense, it is a concept for liminal identities that were considered a threat to the nation-state and applied also to those who were seen by the Ottoman state as potential traitors because of their privileged position under the protection of the European Great Powers. The Levant’s embattled history as a region defined through the intersecting interests of global political players has made it urgent for its inhabitants, whose lives have been formed through the nuts and bolts of the dynamic exchange between Europe and the Ottoman world, to claim identities that are more sharply defined. A Levantine may experience her identity as an amalgam of half-remembered histories, less than fluent languages, alienating customs, and ritualistic remembrance of a pastiche of locations to which they had some connection. For Jacqueline Kahanoff (1917–79), the Jewish Egyptian writer and immigrant to New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv, Levantinism is internal to the self and a source of personal enrichment (Hochberg 2004, p. 223). Paradoxically for her, it is also an identity so unstable that it becomes a source of vexing shame, and any answer would be a sure lie about the individual’s place of origin: I remember a summer when we were sojourning at a hotel in Alexandria, by the sea. There were many English officers and their wives and a certain lady asked me what was I. I didn’t know what to answer. I knew I was not Egyptian, as the Arabs are, but I also knew that it was a motive of great shame for a person not to know who she was. I remembered my old grandparents, so I said I was Persian: I thought in fact that Baghdad was the same city from which all the nice carpets came. Later my mother chided me because I had not said the truth, and told me that when I was asked such a question, I should answer that I was European. I suffered because I perceived that it was an even bigger lie (Kahanoff, quoted in Carlino 2006). Kahanoff emphasises her identity as a Levantine in order to posit a stark contrast to the demand to belong to normative forms of national identity. One of the ironies of the Levantine is that the Levant is not a designation of where they come from. Rather, their relationship to the land they inhabit can be best understood through the dislocations of immigration and exile. Kahanoff, who is now being revived as the grand dame of literary Levantism in Israel, is interested in the Jews who immigrated to Israel from neighbouring countries, as a group that can circumvent the problematics of Arab-Judaism in the struggle against the dominant Ashkenazi ideology of the State. She underlines that her people immigrated because of the ‘fanaticism of Arab nationalism’ (Kahanoff 2011). Her curt dismissal of the political national project of the Arabs replicates the bigotry against the Palestinian Arabs found within Israel and reduces an intensely complicated historical moment to racism. Indeed, there was fanaticism, as living memory can still recall. Yet the categorical exclusion of Jews from Egyptian society is a tragedy that was not separate from the Six-Day War in 1967; or before it, the tripartite attack on Egypt in 1956 after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal. Indeed, it is this historical context that turned the Levantines, including Kahanoff’s own family, but also other CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 9 rich foreigners, including Arab merchants, into exiles and effectively dissolved the ‘Levantine’ as a social group. Kahanoff’s solution fetishises Levantine identity precisely by investing feelings of exile with nostalgic, historical recollections of a belle époque of pre-WWII Levantine metropoles where Europeans, Turks, and Arabs lived and worked together. This is what Kahanoff does when she disparages Israeli society for not attending to the singular importance of the Levant as a cradle of civilisation. She writes: The reaction of the Levantine minorities to European influence was different from that of the Moslem majority. To the latter, European rule, overt or covert, was oppressive; to the minorities it was in many ways liberating, and they took to Western ideas and culture with enthusiasm. (Kahanoff 2011) By constructing Levantine identity as more amiable to ‘Westernisation’ and ‘modernisation’, Kahanoff severs the historical conditions that led to the ‘liberating’ force she finds in Western Imperialism. Muslims are essentialised as much as the Levantines, whose cause she trumpets within Israeli society. Edward Said, who belonged to the same Levantine, non-Muslim, second-hand Arab community as Kahanoff, tells a very different story of what the ‘Levantine’ identity entails. Recollecting their exile from Egypt following the Six-Day War, Said writes about how the Levantine was marked for extinction in the worldly Cairo environment … We were all Shawam, amphibious Levantine creatures whose essential lostness was momentarily stayed by a kind of forgetfulness, a kind of daydream, that included elaborate catered dinner parties, outings to fashionable restaurants, the opera, ballet, and concerts. By the end of the forties we were not just Shawam but khawagat, the designated and respectful title for foreigners which, as used by Muslim Egyptians, has always carried a tinge of hostility. … I resented the implication that I was somehow a foreigner, even though deep down I knew that to them I was, despite being an Arab. (Said 1999, p. 195) Said’s recollection underscores the class dynamics that separated the Levantines from the rest of Egyptian society. His description also confirms what Hourani and others accused the Levantines of, namely a myopic political vision and clear links to colonial powers. Those important contexts for Levantine identity make it possible to reconstruct the history of the Levant outside the sense of nostalgia that covers up, rather than reveals, the social relations that are organised in this region. Our deployment of the Levant critiques this nostalgia but contends that the term remains useful, for it forces us to consider the regional dynamics that continue to bind the Levantine nations together, across temporalities whose spatial organisation differs depending on the chronotope. Thus, the Levant allows us to include both the Ottoman world of the nineteenth century with the more contemporary world of Middle Eastern geopolitics. In its more inclusive geohistorical sense, ‘the Levant’ is a term with which to examine the entanglements between neighbouring societies, be they of historical or of more immediate political value. We view the Levant through the precarity of its entanglements and the disjunctions of competing narratives (Naeff in this issue). For the contributors to this special issue, the punishing past of the Levant belies popular attempts to turn the Levant and its Levantines into a cosmopolitan set of well-dressed people, and they instead propose to view the Levant as a region defined by its historical entanglements where promises of future rebirth must first confront the complicated histories that divided those people along sectarian and national lines. Contributions Delineating the Levant as the area of interest, we have asked contributors to identify chronotopes that have been central to evolving the composite identities of a Levantine mezzaterra. The contributions here comprise sedimentations of Levantine chronotopes that are temporally uneven and spatially dynamic. Together, they propose a historically multiple analysis which makes room for the marginal as the key that unlocks the paradigms of culture and history that have produced the present. Theorising the possibilities of a chronotopic approach to the Levant, Joakim Parslow’s article, ‘The Levant, from Utopia to Chronotopia’, proposes that framing our approach through the 10 R. ISSA AND E. WIGEN chronotope is a methodological choice with profound ethical implications in that it centres our subjects as well as ourselves as historically situated agents who, in writing and action, harness the difference between the given and the imaginary in politically consequential ways. Our contributors put these concepts to analytical use in five more empirical studies following from the discussion provided by Parslow. The Levant did, to some extent, emerge out of the decline, fall, and ultimate dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, and Alp Eren Topal opens the historical inquiry with an article on how Ottoman concepts of order were used chronotopically to tie together the history of the Ottoman Empire and emplot current events into a longer historical narrative, making sense of the present by reference to a by-gone ‘Golden Age’ as well as the cyclical understanding of time and history that suffused Ottoman historiography. From here follows Yonathan Furas’ article ‘We the Semites’, in which he studies history books in mandate Palestine, arguing that one way of reconceptualising a community transcending the categories of Jew and Arab was to ‘reach back’ into history to find the common category of ‘Semite.’ This competing category, which ultimately fell by the wayside, is an interesting way of invoking a common past in much the same way as nation-building projects have employed historiography. Because the category belongs in a realm that is beyond any current nation-state and also mobilises historical narratives in a chronotopic fashion, it is an apt illustration of the approach we seek to elucidate here. Toufoul Abou Hodeib’s article ‘Involuntary History’ picks up another aspect of phenomena that transcend the emergent nation-states when she looks at the social history of the borderlands between what became Lebanon and Israel and the social networks that were disrupted as a consequence of state-making and communal delineations, where a chronotopic focus on the emerging border areas destabilises the dominant nation state history that produced them. Taking the chronotope into diplomatic history, Jørgen Jensehaugen examines Menachem Begin’s suggestion for granting Palestinians ‘non-territorial self-rule’ in his article ‘Terra Morata.’ The point here is that the notion of Palestinian self-rule was a sleight of hand. For Begin the West Bank (and Gaza) were eternally Jewish territories, and the Palestinians mere residents on the land. Unlike Israeli settlers, they were not considered to be of the land. The final piece, by Judith Naeff, also takes us into the more contemporary political scene, comparing how the nightclub BO-18 and Hariri’s shrine in Beirut bring the past into the present in different ways and by doing so invoke different ways of dealing with, memorialising and commercialising trauma in contemporary Lebanon. The experiment in the chronotope that we present here brought together historians that are insistent on the incomplete story, stories that have been orphaned from history and accused of an ahistorical cultural bias. Through the chronotope we propose that the partial story can be thoroughly historical, aware of its diachronic trajectories that intersect with its chronotopic coordinates as material presence. Through this volume we sought to re-emplot the partial histories into a historical praxis that attends to the margins as a way to unpack dominant narratives and destabilise the discourses that subjugated alternatives and others to historical erasure and neglect. Notes 1. We here draw upon a range of literatures, such as Werner and Zimmermann (2006) and (Pernau 2012, 2016). 2. Timur Hammond’s ‘The Middle East without Space?’ offers a critique of current usages of ‘space’ in Middle Eastern studies (2017). Disclosure statement No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. Funding This work was supported by Research Council Norway [Grant Number 283375]. CONTEMPORARY LEVANT 11 Notes on contributors Rana Issa is Assistant Professor of Translation Studies at the American University of Beirut. Her areas of interest include Literary History, World Literature, Arabic, and foundational texts. She is the Translation editor of Rusted radishes: Beirut's literary journal. She is currently finishing a monograph on the history of modern Arabic Bibles that will be forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. Einar Wigen is associate professor of Turkish studies at the University of Oslo. He is author of two books, State of translation: Turkey in interlingual relations and (with Iver B. Neumann) The steppe tradition in international relations: Russians, Turks and European state building 4000 BCE–2017 CE. Wigen works with international relations, conceptual history, temporality and imperial legacies. References Al-Bushārī, A.-M., (990) 2003. ʾah san Al-Taqāsīm Fī Maʿrifat Al-ʾaqālīm. In: M. a. K., ed. Al-Suwaydī. Abu Dhabi. Available from: al-Waraq.net [Accessed 17 Jun 2015]. Al-Haj Saleh, Y., 12 Oct 2012. Jamaat ma tabaqqa: al-sunniyun al-suriyun wal siyasah. Al-jumhuriya. Available from: https:// www.aljumhuriya.net/ar/237. Al-Hamawī, Y.I.-a.a.-R., (1226) 2003. Kitāb Mu’jam Al-Buldān. In: M. a. K., ed. Al-Suwaydī. Abu Dhabi. 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