Avsnitt
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with Ali Kulez hosted by Sam Dolbee
| In 1866, a series of unexpected events led to an Ottoman imam by the name of Abd al-Rahman al-Baghdadi ending up in Rio de Janeiro. In this episode, Ali Kulez explains how he got there, and what happened when al-Baghdadi became close with enslaved and free Afro-Brazilian Muslims, and attempted to teach them his vision of Islamic orthodoxy. In addition to exploring themes of Islam and race in Brazil, Kulez also traces how the translation of al-Baghdadi's travel narrative can offer a window onto the history of South-South relations into the present. In closing, he discusses the challenge of evaluating past solidarities and differentiating them from those we might want to see. « Click for More » -
with Andrew Simon, Alia Mossallam, and Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | The Egyptian revolution of 2011 is one of the most spectacular examples of how social media has played a pivotal role in political movements of the 21st century. However, in this final installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we argue that the true beginning of Egypt's media revolution arrived with the cassette tape, which for the first time, made it possible for every Egyptian to be a producer rather than a passive consumer of popular culture. As our guest Andrew Simon explains, this veritable "media of the masses" was not only a means of disseminating commercial music. Western pop music and classics of the Nasserist era mingled with new underground music, religious content, home recordings, and personal voice messages on Egyptian cassettes, which circumvented and subverted state censorship. Artists like Sheikh Imam and the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm produced celebrated political satire that defined the sound of the Infitah era, much to the chagrin of state authorities and the commercial recording industry. In 2011, when Egyptians took to the streets to protest the Mubarak regime, Imam's songs along with a century of sound stretching back to the First World War filled Tahrir Square in Cairo, as a new generation produced new sounds of revolution. We conclude our series with reflections from Alia Mossallam and Ziad Fahmy on the sounds of the square in 2011 and what they reveal about change and continuity in Egyptian politics. « Click for More » -
Saknas det avsnitt?
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with Leena Dallasheh hosted by Chris Gratien | As an Arab city inside the 1948 borders of Israel, Nazareth defies many of the general narratives of both Israeli and Palestinian histories. But as our guest Leena Dallasheh explains, that does not mean that Nazareth is necessarily an exception. In fact, its paradoxical survival is key to understanding the history of modern Palestinian politics. In this conversation, we chart the history of Nazareth's rise from provincial town to Palestinian cultural capital. We consider the reasons why Nazareth survived the Nakba, and we explore the important role of Palestinian communities in the years before and decades after the foundation of Israel. « Click for More » -
Şeyma Afacan Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde, Dr. Şeyma Afacan ile geç Osmanlı’da biyolojik materyalizm, psikolojinin gelişimi ve Afacan’ın bir “ezber bozma alanı” olarak nitelediği duygular tarihi üzerine sohbet ediyoruz. Osmanlı’da materyalizm tartışmalarının eksikliklerine işaret eden Afacan, beden, duygu ve üretkenlik arasındaki ilişkiye odaklanmanın bu çalışmalara sunabileceği olası katkılara dikkati çekiyor ve biyolojik materyalizm tartışmasının her şeyden evvel “psikolojik bir tartışma” olduğunu öne sürüyor. Afacan tarih yazımında duyguları analitik bir kategori olarak kullanmanın imkânlarını ve kısıtlarını da detaylandırıyor. Afacan’ın bu söyleşide çizdiği genel çerçevenin bir izleğini Toplumsal Tarih’in Ocak 2024 sayısı için derlediği dosyadaki çalışmalarda görmek de mümkün. « Click for More » -
with Ümit Kurt hosted by Sam Dolbee
| What were the economic forces that drove the violence of the Armenian genocide? In this episode, historian Ümit Kurt speaks about his research on the role of property in the history of the dispossession and deportation of Aintab’s Armenian community. Despite archival silences, he reveals the central role of legal mechanisms and local propertied elites in these processes. In closing, he discusses the legacies of the “economics of genocide” into the present day, and how his research has been received. « Click for More » -
with Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In 1952, a coup d'état led by Gamal Abdel Nasser ushered in a revolutionary period of Egyptian history in which sound played an integral role in shaping collective political consciousness. The culture of the 50s and 60s was dominated by songs by artists like Umm Kulthum and Abdel Halim Hafez that still resonate within national consciousness, but as we explore in this third installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," the period produced spectacular sound as well as conspicous silence. As our guest Alia Mossallam explains, triumphant musical celebrations of the Egyptian state's signature achievement --- the construction of the Aswan High Dam --- shaped the terms through which Egyptian's have come to remember this period. At the same time, songs of workers and Nubian villagers displaced by the dam captured subaltern sentiments beneath the surface of Nasserist cultural hegemony. We conclude our conversation with a reflection on the singular importance of sources like folk songs for writing histories erased by official sources. « Click for More » -
with Brett Wilson hosted by Brittany White | Set between elite households and a Sufi lodge, Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoğlu's 1922 novel Nur Baba was a provocative take on competing notions of religion, morality, gender, and romance in the dynamic world of late Ottoman Istanbul. In this episode, we speak to Brett Wilson, author of the first-ever English translation of Karaosmanoğlu's controversial classic. We discuss Yakup Kadri's ethnographic approach to his subject, its mixed reception, and the insights it offers about modern Turkish culture. We also discuss the joys of translation, and its importance for students of Ottoman history today. « Click for More » -
with Maha Nassar hosted by Susanna Ferguson | 1948 marks the year that Israel gained independence, and for Palestinians, an experience of mass exile known as the Nakba. The displacement of Palestinians and subsequent conflicts between Israel and its Arab neighbors had immense consequences. But how did the Palestinian Arabs who remained and make up roughly 20% of Israel's population today fit into a Middle East region defined by the "Arab-Israeli conflict?" In this podcast, we speak to Maha Nassar, whose first book Brothers Apart: Palestinian Citizens of Israel and the Arab World casts new light on a community historically marginalized both within Israel and within broader discussions of contemporary Arab history. We discuss how Palestinian citizens of Israel were cut off from friends, relatives, and compatriots after 1948, and how they used literature as means of forging new transnational connections during the era of Arab nationalism and decolonization. Through the insights born out of their paradoxical experiences, Arab-Israeli authors of poetry, fiction, and non-fiction would come to occupy a prominent place not only within both Arab and Israeli literature but also global political thought. « Click for More » -
with Ziad Fahmy hosted by Chris Gratien | During the interwar period, the recording industry reshaped Egyptian culture and politics through music. But as we discuss in part two of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," everyday sounds of the city are no less part of Egypt's political history. As our guest Ziad Fahmy explains, writing sonic history requires listening to the sources with ears attuned to the sentiments and sensibilities of past people. Together, we listen to a early recording of Egyptian street sounds and explore the world of sound that awaits within the textual record, focusing on how class dynamics played out on the soundscape of Cairo and Alexandria. We also consider how the rise of a new medium, radio, began to reshape the sonic life of ordinary Egyptians during the interwar period, paving the way for the media revolution of the 1950s and 60s. « Click for More » -
with Avner Wishnitzer hosted by Sam Dolbee
| What did the nighttime mean in the early modern Ottoman Empire? In this episode, Avner Wishnitzer discusses his recent book As Night Falls: Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Cities After Dark (also available in Turkish translation by Can Gümüş as Gece Çökerken). He explains how the night was a time for sleep, rest, devotion, sex, crime, drinking, and even revolt. He also talks about the challenges of past sensory states, the influence of the late Walter Andrews on his work, and, finally, the relationship between his work as a historian and his work as an activist. « Click for More » -
with Kyle Anderson & Alia Mossallam hosted by Chris Gratien | In the aftermath of the First World War, the Egyptian streets rose up against British rule during a period of global anti-imperialism, and the voices of the 1919 revolution have echoed throughout Egyptian history ever since. In this first installment of our four-part series on "The Sound of Revolution in Modern Egypt," we consider how the First World War reshaped political consciousness in Egypt, as our guests Kyle Anderson and Alia Mossallam explore the experiences of the Egyptian Labor Corps and the sonic history of WWI. We examine the adventure, hardship, exile, and abuse Egyptian workers faced serving the British war effort, as well as how the war changed the society they returned to, in the words of one famous song from the period, "safe and sound." In discussing the popular songs of the war period that entered Egyptian national canon, our guests illuminate the ways in which shared songs can be modified and repurposed for new political contexts, drawing attention to the need for reconstructing the layers of context contained within some of history's earliest sound recordings. « Click for More » -
with Jessica Marglin hosted by Brittany White | In 1873, Nissim Shamama died suddenly at his palazzo in Livorno. He was quietly one of the richest men in the Mediterranean. A Tunisian Jew born in the Ottoman Empire, Shamama had taken his place among the mercantile elite of a newly-unified Italy. He was a man who belonged to many places. But to whom would his vast inheritance belong? Our guest Jessica Marglin has published an award-winning book, The Shamama Case, that marshals an impressive array of archival sources to investigate how this question was resolved. As she demonstrates, the decade-long legal dispute over Shamama's estate was an international affair involving Tunisian officials, rabbis from throughout the Mediterranean, and some of Italy's foremost legal minds. In this conversation, we talk to Marglin about some of the highlights of the Shamama case, what it taught her about the history of citizenship and nationality in the 19th century Mediterranean, and the power of microhistory for disrupting conventional framings of the period. « Click for More » -
with Rashid Khalidi hosted by Zeinab Azarbadegan | In this episode, Rashid Khalidi discusses his latest book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017, where he defines Zionism not only as a nationalist project in conflict with the Palestinian one, but also a settler colonial project supported by the British and later the American imperialism. We begin in the late Ottoman period as Khalidi examines the familiar episodes and key turning points, which he characterizes as declaratations of war and wagings of war on Palestinians. We discuss the 1917 Balfour declaration and the communal conflict in the British Mandate of Palestine that led to the general strike and Arab revolt of 1936. The 1948 war, the Palestinian Nakba, and the creation of the State of Israel provide the backdrop for Cold War period conflicts, the rise of the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the outbreak of the First Intifada, which culminated in the Oslo Accords of 1993-95. Khalidi reflects on his experiences with the failures of Oslo, which set the stage for the rise of Hamas in Gaza and periodic sieges that have continued to the present day. We conclude with a consideration of the current war, situating the unprecedented civilian toll of both the attacks by Hamas in Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on the Gaza Strip within Khalidi's larger narrative of more than a century of war on Palestine. « Click for More » -
Jesse Howellhosted by Sam Dolbee
| In this episode, Jesse Howell discusses the history of the early modern caravan route between Ragusa (modern-day Dubrovnik) and Istanbul. In attending to the long-distance connections between the early modern Ottoman state and the Mediterranean world, he reveals the multi-ethnic communities that came together on the caravan route, the ways that Ottoman state established infrastructure to support mobility and circulation along these pathways, and the material afterlives of these layers of history in very different historical eras. We also talk about the challenge of not getting the information we want from sources, and how to grapple with that absence. In Jesse’s case, that struggle has included riding along a portion of the road on a bicycle, a trip that was chronicled in an earlier episode. « Click for More » -
with Lucia Carminati hosted by Susanna Ferguson | The Suez Canal was one of the largest infrastructure projects in the late Ottoman world. Built to connect the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, the canal construction's lasted from 1858-1869 and mobilized tens of thousands of workers from across Egypt and the broader Mediterreanan. Those workers' lives and labor transformed the canal zone and Egypt at large, and their stories, travels, pleasures, and challenges reveal the networks that knit the late-nineteenth century Mediterranean together from below. « Click for More » -
with Nilay Özok-Gündoğan hosted by Sam Dolbee | As the Ottoman state expanded in the sixteenth century, it extended a number of privileges to elite families in Kurdistan. In this episode, Nilay Özok-Gündoğan discusses her new book The Kurdish Nobility in the Ottoman Empire, which explains how these hereditary privileges—unique in the empire—developed and changed in the region of Palu between this moment and the nineteenth century, when the Ottoman state attempted to rescind such autonomy. Writing against scholarship that either ignores such families or understands them only in nationalist terms, Özok-Gündoğan attends to property, labor, and mineral extraction and how they ultimately all shaped the nature of the unprecedented violence at the end of empire. She also discusses her own journey writing this book, including her time teaching in Mardin and eventually being forced to leave Turkey. « Click for More »
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Aslıhan Gürbüzel Sunucu: Can Gümüş | Bu bölümde, Doç. Dr. Aslıhan Gürbüzel’in bu sene başında University of California Press’ten çıkan kitabı “Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700” başlıklı kitabı temelinde Osmanlı’da kamusal siyasetin oluşumunu tartışıyoruz. Kitap, Osmanlı’da devlet inşası sürecinin bir parçası olarak devletin artan merkezî gücüne, genişleyen bir kamusal siyasetin eşlik ettiğine işaret ediyor; erken modern dönemin aktif yurttaş oluşumunu görmek açısından kritik bir öneme sahip olduğunun altını çiziyor. Bu sohbette, söz konusu dönemdeki çoğul kamusal alanların katılımcılarını tanıyıp devletle ilişkilerini incelerken, Osmanlı örneğinin kamusal alan tartışmaları ve araştırmalarına sunduğu katkıları detaylandırıyoruz. « Click for More » -
Samuel Dolbeehosted by Chris Gratien and Reem Bailony | What can we learn about the late Ottoman Empire from the histories of its would-be margins? In this episode, we explore that question in multiple senses through a conversation with longtime Ottoman History Podcast contributor Sam Dolbee about his book "Locusts of Power: Borders, Empire, and Environment in the Modern Middle East." The book studies the dynamic history of the Jazira region, which straddles the modern borders of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. From the Tanzimat-era reordering of the Ottoman provinces to the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of new nation-states, we discuss how the environment of the Jazira region and its people were both actors and objects in the remaking of the Middle East. Building out from the changing lives of locusts, grasshoppers that intermittently imposed themselves on the Jazira's history by devouring agricultural crops, Dolbee casts light onto communities of nomads and migrants often excluded from the empire's modern history. In the process, he shows how the people of Jazirah both made and resisted new administrative and national borders of the period. « Click for More »
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with Chloe Bordewich and Lydia Harrington hosted by Meryum Kazmi and Harry Bastermajian | a collaboration with Harvard Islamica --- In this episode, we leave Harvard and Cambridge to explore the little-known history of immigration from the former Ottoman Empire to Boston in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. While completing their PhDs at Boston University and Harvard, Dr. Lydia Harrington and Dr. Chloe Bordewich began to research the history of the neighborhood in today's Chinatown and South End once known as Little Syria. Through the study of property maps, newspapers, oral history interviews, and immigration records, Chloe and Lydia have uncovered the story of this diasporic community from today’s Syria and Lebanon and added both to our understanding of Ottoman immigration to the United States and the history of Boston. The resulting public history project now includes walking tours of Little Syria, an article in both English and Arabic, an exhibit, and a digital humanities project. « Click for More »
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with Nicholas Morton hosted by Maryam Patton
| The Mongol Empire was the largest contiguous land empire in history, yet its influence on the social and political history of the realms that came under its domain is often minimized due to its short-lived nature. In some ways, the most lasting effects of the Mongol invasions were the unexpected geopolitical shakeups that their arrival brought. Notable examples included the increase in the slave trade which facilitated the rise of the Mamluk sultanate, or the controlled chaos of competing Turkmen tribes who had fled to Anatolia, setting the stage for the eventual rise of the Ottomans. The Mongols were not merely invaders, however, and an overemphasis on military history often conceals the rich cultural history of a nomadic society with its own religious traditions and policies of tolerance towards the diverse societies of the medieval Near East. In this episode, we discuss these topics and more with Nicholas Morton, the author of a new book on the Mongols, entitled The Mongol Storm: Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East. « Click for More » - Visa fler
