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    • Roundtable on Archives, Revolution, Historical Thinking >
      • Historicizing Hope/lessness in Revolutionary Times by Rosie Bsheer
      • Archives as Repositories of Resistance: Syrian Uprisings Past and PresentNew Page
      • The Algerian Archive Between Two Revolutions
      • An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021
      • “Secrets of Revolution”: Iraq and the Global 1919
      • Archive as Sensorium: 2021 in 1940 and 1940 in 2021
      • In Search of Iran’s Revolutionary Archives
THE ARAB UPRISINGS PROJECT
  • About
  • Events
  • Resources
  • Articles
    • Roundtable on Archives, Revolution, Historical Thinking >
      • Historicizing Hope/lessness in Revolutionary Times by Rosie Bsheer
      • Archives as Repositories of Resistance: Syrian Uprisings Past and PresentNew Page
      • The Algerian Archive Between Two Revolutions
      • An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021
      • “Secrets of Revolution”: Iraq and the Global 1919
      • Archive as Sensorium: 2021 in 1940 and 1940 in 2021
      • In Search of Iran’s Revolutionary Archives

Roundtable on Archives, Revolution, Historical Thinking (Editor's Introduction)

By Sherene Seikaly

On March 26, 2021 the Centers for Middle East Studies at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara, as part of the yearlong collaborative project “Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World,” held a roundtable titled “Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking.” 
December 17, 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. Beginning in 2011, mass uprisings swept North Africa and the Middle East, spreading from the shores of Tunisia to Egypt, Libya, Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and the Eastern Province of the Arabian Peninsula. In more recent years, Sudan, Algeria, Lebanon, and Iraq also experienced mass protests and uprisings, some of which are ongoing. The persistence of demands for popular sovereignty even in the face of re-entrenched authoritarianism, imperial intervention, and civil strife is a critical chapter in regional and global history. In an effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on protests, revolutions, and uprisings, this roundtable addressed the relationship between archives, historical thinking, and revolution—both past and present. 

The scholars gathered here reflect on the relationships between archives, revolution, and historical thinking. Traversing Syria from 1925 to 2011, Reem Bailony navigates revolt and rebellion past and present to reveal how archives sustain revolution beyond the narrow confines of success and failure. Reflecting on her research on Saudi Arabia as well as the social, economic, political, and infrastructural collapse in twenty-first century Lebanon, Rosie Bsheer poses hope and hopelessness as essential categories of analysis. Putting Revolution 1 (1968) in conversation with Revolution 2 (2021), Muriam Haleh Davis unfolds archives as spaces of constructing, destroying, and rebuilding self, state, and sovereignty. Traveling through the punctured, condensed, and elongated times and spaces of uprising, Pascale Ghazaleh narrates revolution and counterrevolution through archival access and practice in Egypt. Traces the Iraqi scholar Hibat al-Din al-Shahrastani, Sara Pursley exits the nation-state’s temporal and spatial confines to uncover otherwise hidden ideas, sensibilities, and strategies of anticolonial revolution. Participating in the Lebanese uprising of 2019 and witnessing the country’s collapse in 2020-21, Nadya Sbaiti invites us to bring our emotions more explicitly into our archival readings of violence, of the threat of massacre, of the imaginings of a better future. Finally, Naghmeh Sohrabi, although not joining us on March 26, graces our pages here. Detailing a brief post-revolutionary window in 1979 Iran, when rebels where wresting control of SAVAK archives, she narrates revolution and historical thinking as a curiosity to know one’s own life, those trivial details captured in what she calls “bureaucratic life-keeping.”
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Read the Articles in the Roundtable Here:
  • Rosie Bsheer, Historicizing Hope/lessness in Revolutionary Times
  • Reem Bailony, Archives as Repositories of Resistance: Syrian Uprisings Past and Present
  • Muriam Haleh Davis, The Algerian Archive between Two Revolutions
  • Pascale Ghazaleh, An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021
  • Sara Pursley, “Secrets of Revolution”: Iraq and the Global 1919
  • Nadya Sbaiti, Archive as Sensorium: 2021 in 1940 and 1940 in 2021
  • Naghmeh Sohrabi, In Search of Iran’s Revolutionary Archives
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Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World

Organized by: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, and George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program. Co-Sponsored by: Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), Arab Council for the Social Sciences, Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), University of Chicago (Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory), Stanford University (Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Stanford University), AUC Affiliates, Georgetown University (Qatar) Center For International And Regional Studies (CIRS), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), Institute of Palestine Studies.

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The Arab Uprisings Resources 
A project of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI.org)

  • About
  • Events
  • Resources
  • Articles
    • Roundtable on Archives, Revolution, Historical Thinking >
      • Historicizing Hope/lessness in Revolutionary Times by Rosie Bsheer
      • Archives as Repositories of Resistance: Syrian Uprisings Past and PresentNew Page
      • The Algerian Archive Between Two Revolutions
      • An Archive of Forgetting: Egypt, 2011-2021
      • “Secrets of Revolution”: Iraq and the Global 1919
      • Archive as Sensorium: 2021 in 1940 and 1940 in 2021
      • In Search of Iran’s Revolutionary Archives