In this talk, Aya Labanieh presents her research on conspiracy tropes in twentieth-century Middle Eastern literature and media, developing “conspiracy” as a critical tool to explore how colonized people theorize and imagine political power, and to trace the dialectical relationship between real imperial conspiracies and popular conspiracy tropes. Drawing on historical records of spy rings, psyops, and scandals, alongside the scholarship of Peter Knight, Hillel Cohen, and Ghassan Kanafani, Labanieh zeroes in on the particular conspiracy trope of the “collaborator” (‘ameel) within the context of the Cold War in the Arab world, and how the trope was produced in dialogue with the real conspiracies and proxy wars of its time. Lastly, she presents the case-study of Emile Habibi, an Arab Israeli Communist politician and author, along with his semi-autobiographical novel, The Secret Life of Saeed, The Pessoptimist (1974), as a satire of the political agency of both the resistance writer and his antithesis, the collaborator, in Cold War Palestine.
Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, conspiracy, media, and memory culture. She received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with a dissertation entitled “One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Media” (2025). She is presently a researcher at EUME and SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and this August she will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study of the Global South at Northwestern University in Qatar. Her work contends with the intertwinement of conspiracy, memory, and power in Anglophone and Arabophone literatures and mediaspheres—spanning genres of dystopian science fiction, radical Internet subcultures, and the memoirs of agents and spies. She has published in, among others, the Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and the Journal of Postcolonial Writing, alongside public-facing venues such as Aeon and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
This event is part of the ZMO Summer Colloquium 2026 and will take place in a hybid format. More information and the registration link for online attendance can be found here.