From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine

FAIN: FEL-281951-22

Sherene R. Seikaly
University of California, Santa Barbara (Santa Barbara, CA 93106-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book that uses the life of Naim Cotran (c.1877-1961) to understand Levantine mobility and the challenges faced by Palestinian upper middle classes at the turn of the twentieth century. 

How do we understand conflicting claims to land and land’s relationship to colonialism? This is the question of Palestine. At its best, this question can offer new ways to think about land and history. Yet, histories and historiographies of Palestine remain limited to the territorial and conceptual borders of the nation-state. My book project, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine, charts an escape from nationalist confines. The central figure of my narrative is a Palestinian man who was at once a colonial officer and a colonized subject, an enslaver and a refugee. I explore how his trajectory from nineteenth century mobility across Baltimore and Sudan to twentieth century immobility in Lebanon places the question of Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession.

Associated Products

Reading in Time (Article)
Title: Reading in Time
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Abstract: Reflecting on a series of photographs and documents from family papers from the injured and resilient Palestinian story, this piece reflects on the reading and writing of history, the connections between the personal and the historical, and the entangled links between the past and the lived present. Exploring the multiple registers of reading, from the mundane to the extraordinary, reveals a temporal spectrum that encompasses uprisings, initiatives, movements, and catastrophes. Through four captions on a photograph, a love letter, a passport, and a death certificate, practices of reading as commitments to, adventures in, and vehicles for time help us navigate the limits, the potential, and the possibilities of humanities as a site for social justice.
Year: 2023
Primary URL: http://https://worldhumanitiesreport.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/WHR-AR_6.UrgencyTemporality_Seikaly.pdf
Primary URL Description: Journal Website
Access Model: open access
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: World Humanities Report
Publisher: World Humanities Report

Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe (Blog Post)
Title: Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Abstract: What lessons does the history and present of Palestine offer for surviving catastrophe? Putting climate crisis in conversation with politics, this piece contributes insights on history, historiography, and temporality.
Date: 5/15/2023
Primary URL: http://https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/45037
Primary URL Description: blog post
Website: Jadaliyya

"The Future of the Palestinian Past" (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: "The Future of the Palestinian Past"
Abstract: How do we narrate history and how does the narration shape our understandings of the past and the future.
Author: Amanda Batarseh
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Date: 12/7/22
Location: Palestine in the Age of Empire Conference 1600-1923, International Centre on Racism
Primary URL: http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a7MxXu521Zo

“Reading in Time: On the Question of Palestine” (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: “Reading in Time: On the Question of Palestine”
Abstract: Reflecting on a series of photographs and documents from family papers from the injured and resilient Palestinian story, this piece reflects on the reading and writing of history, the connections between the personal and the historical, and the entangled links between the past and the lived present. Exploring the multiple registers of reading, from the mundane to the extraordinary, reveals a temporal spectrum that encompasses uprisings, initiatives, movements, and catastrophes. Through four captions on a photograph, a love letter, a passport, and a death certificate, practices of reading as commitments to, adventures in, and vehicles for time help us navigate the limits, the potential, and the possibilities of humanities as a site for social justice.
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Date: 02/08/23
Location: Georgetown University, Doha, Qatar

Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe
Abstract: What lessons does the history and present of Palestine offer for surviving catastrophe? Putting climate crisis in conversation with politics, this piece contributes insights on history, historiography, and temporality.
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Date: 03/15/2023
Location: Invited Lecture, The Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies, San Diego State University

Race and Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Race and Catastrophe: Lessons from Palestine
Abstract: Delving into the histories of Sudan, Baltimore, and Lebanon, this talk asks can Palestine teach us about the global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession? What is the relationship between land and colonialism? Moving beyond paradigms of exceptionalism and the confines of the nation-state reveals Palestine as a key site to explore these questions. Tracing the struggle on and over land, this talk reflects on Palestine’s lessons in and with the movement for global racial justice.
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Date: 04/13/23
Location: Keynote, Race and Religion Palestine Workshop, sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies, The Society of Fellows, and Heyman Center for the Humanities, and the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia University

Kantousha and the Pox: Notes on Historical Writing (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: Kantousha and the Pox: Notes on Historical Writing
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Abstract: Kantousha found me as I was looking for the story of my great grandfather, a Palestinian who worked as a medical doctor in interwar Sudan under the Anglo-Egyptian government. He was one of many Syrian Christians who the British recruited as junior partners in the medicalization and colonization of Sudan. I spent many months reading the files of John B. Christopherson, my great-grandfather’s supervisor. Christopherson’s management of the smallpox outbreak of 1903 won him much recognition. Drawing on "critical fabulation," through the voice of the outbreak’s patient zero, Kantousha, I ponder who has the power to document, which documents count as archive, and which regimes of erasure the historian is complicit in.
Date: 04/24/23
Conference Name: Invited Presenter, Eurasian Empires Workshop, Stanford Humanities Center, Stanford University

Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe (Public Lecture or Presentation)
Title: Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe
Abstract: What lessons does the history and present of Palestine offer for surviving catastrophe? Putting climate crisis in conversation with politics, this piece contributes insights on history, historiography, and temporality.
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Date: 04/25/23
Location: Invited Speaker, Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies, Stanford University

“Fiscal Geographies: Between Empire and Partition” (Conference Paper/Presentation)
Title: “Fiscal Geographies: Between Empire and Partition”
Author: Sherene Seikaly
Abstract: Hailing from Mount Lebanon in the Eastern Mediterranean, Sa‘id Shuqair (1868 – 1934) joined the Anglo-Egyptian government of Sudan at its inception in 1899. As Director General of Accounts, his files offer a window onto shifting fiscal geographies. We travel with him from the establishment of the Bank of Abyssinia (1905) through the ravages of famine in Sudan (1913) and Syria (1915), to the hope and despair of revolution and partition. Along the way, fluctuating currencies, fiscal calendars, and rates of exchange reveal empires in flux and proliferating struggles for popular sovereignty. Like many of the colonial officials hailing from bilad al sham, Sa‘id Shuqair was a junior officer in a colonial endeavor that would ultimately betray his peoples’ claims to sovereignty. These men entered the domain of Sudan and its multiplicity of peoples and nations, with an aspirational whiteness. That whiteness was dynamic and in process, a way of being and a set of claims that would puncture in some ways and reify itself in others. More than most of his compatriots hailing from Greater Syria and working as medical officials, Shuqair was visible in the archival record, even if his battle for a promotion and pension continued until his last days in the service. Along the way, Shuqair and men like him would travel from a committed Anglophilia to the vanquish of the “subject races.” It was along this trajectory and in the richness and abundance of Sudan, that Shuqair and men and to a lesser extent women like him, moved from insisting on the Syrian as a chosen and specific race to shaping the category of the Arab as a modern anti-colonial subjectivity. Blackness and antiblackness were crucial to this journey.
Date: 05/24/23
Conference Name: Global Histories of Austerity Workshop, University of Wisconsin, Madison

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