EUME Discussion
Fr. 30 Juni 2023 | 15:00–17:00

Russian-Arab Worlds: From Intrepid Individuals to Transregional History

Convened by Margaret Litvin (Boston University / EUME Fellow 2017/18) and Masha Kirasirova (NYU Abu Dhabi)

Forum Transregionale Studien, Wallotstr. 14, 14193 Berlin

Cover image: Painting by Mahmoud Sabri.

The roots of Arab countries’ current Russian entanglements reach deep into the Soviet and even tsarist periods. This book launch will celebrate and explore the new anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History, which points to a new way of teaching and studying Russia, its borderlands and neighbors in the Caucasus and Central Asia, and its Arabic-speaking interlocutors.

Poster (PDF)
 
The anthology presents and contextualizes a diverse set of primary sources translated from Russian, Arabic, Armenian, Persian, French, and Tatar, each introduced by a specialist and appearing in English for the first time: a 1772 Russian naval officer’s diary, an Arabic slave sale deed from the Caucasus, a report on Russian delegates at the 1926 Mecca Congress, the memoir of an Egyptian engineering student in Astrakhan, and many more. Each of the 34 chapters challenges a prevailing assumption in its own field. These documents show how various Russian/Soviet and Arab governments sought to nurture political and cultural ties and expand their influence, often with unplanned results. They illuminate transnational networks of trade, pilgrimage, study, ethnic identity, and political affinity that states policies sometimes fostered and sometimes disrupted.

Above all they give voice to some of the resourceful individuals who have embodied and exploited transregional contacts between Arab societies and Russia or the USSR: missionaries and diplomats, soldiers and refugees, students and party activists, scholars and spies. These stories elude the standard periodizations, geographic divisions, and assumptions about culture and religion (and about where certain groups of people “belong”) that have shaped the separate fields of Russian/Soviet/Slavic and Middle Eastern studies. Together, they offer a model for how to escape nationalist frames and do transregional history in an inclusive, multi-perspectival way.
 

The following speakers will discuss the newly published anthology Russian-Arab Worlds: A Documentary History (Oxford University Press, June 2023), edited by Eileen Kane, Masha Kirasirova and Margaret Litvin:

Masha Kirasirova (NYU-Abu Dhabi)
Margaret Litvin (Boston University / EUME Fellow 2017/18)
Roy Bar Sadeh (Global Intellectual History Graduate School, Berlin)
Sana Tannoury-Karam (LAU / EUME Fellow 2020-23)

The panel discussion will be followed by special readings by:

Khalil Alrez, novelist and translator, will read from his novel Al-Hayy al-Rusi (The Russian Quarter, 2019).
Alexandra Chreiteh (Tufts University / EUME Fellow 2022/23), author of Da'iman Coca Cola (Always Coca-Cola, 2009) and ʻAli wa-ummuhu al-Rusiyah (Ali and His Russian Mother, 2010), will read passages from her new novel.

The event will be followed by a reception.

We kindly ask for prior registration via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the event will be recorded. All audio recordings of EUME’s events are available on SoundCloud.

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