Inventing Laziness: The Culture of Productivity in Late Ottoman Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021)

Neither laziness nor its condemnation are new inventions, however, perceiving laziness as a social condition that afflicts a 'nation' is. In the early modern era, Ottoman political treatises did not regard the people as the source of the state's problems. Yet in the nineteenth century, as the imperial ideology of Ottomanism and modern discourses of citizenship spread, so did the understanding of laziness as a social disease that the 'Ottoman nation' needed to eradicate. Asking what we can learn about Ottoman history over the long nineteenth-century by looking closely into the contested and shifting boundaries of the laziness - productivity binary, Melis Hafez explores how 'laziness' can be used to understand emerging civic culture and its exclusionary practices in the Ottoman Empire. A polyphonic involvement of moralists, intellectuals, polemicists, novelists, bureaucrats, and, to an extent, the public reveals the complexities and ambiguities of this multifaceted cultural transformation. Using a wide variety of sources, this book explores the sustained anxiety about productivity that generated numerous reforms as well as new understandings of morality, subjectivity, citizenship, and nationhood among the Ottomans.

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz: Feminist Thinking in Fin-de-siècle Egypt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021)

The Career and Communities of Zaynab Fawwaz focuses on an endlessly fascinating individual who I believe challenges our notions of how to ‘think feminism’ through and in late-nineteenth-century Ottoman and Arabophone urban print discourse. While the book is framed by Fawwaz’s life experience, that’s necessarily rather minimal because so much is not known—and the existing narratives may say more about assumptions about being female than about actual lives. On the other hand, the archive of her activities as an informant for the Egyptian Palace late in life offers some specific and rather gripping material! It’s a sharp reminder that we cannot take an individual’s public imprint—as a writer—as a measure of her politics, or her material needs. Most of the book is a series of chapters focusing on her writings; I have tried to organise each of these as stand-alone studies, so that no one has to read all of a very long book! I’ve wanted to do her justice by trying to set her works carefully in context and analysing them against those to whom she was responding, and offering a lot of text in translation to try to convey not only her voice(s) but many other voices as well.

"Ladies Aid as Labor History: Working-Class Formation in the Mahjar," Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 17(3), 2021

In the Arabic-speaking mahjar (diaspora), the plight of the working poor was the focus of women’s philanthropy. Scholarship on welfare relief in the interwar Syrian, Lebanese, and Palestinian diaspora currently situates it within a gendered politics of benevolence. This article reconsiders that frame and argues for a class-centered reassessment of “ladies aid” politics exploring the intersections of women’s relief with proletarian mutual aid strategies. Founded in 1917, the Syrian Ladies Aid Society (SLAS) of Boston provided food, shelter, education, and employment to Syrian workers. SLAS volunteers understood their efforts as mitigating the precarities imposed on Syrian workers by the global capitalist labor system. Theirs was both a women’s organization and a proletarian movement led by Syrian women. Drawing from SLAS records and the Syrian American press, the article centers Syrian American women within processes of working-class formation and concludes that labor history of the interwar mahjar requires focus on spaces of social reproduction beyond the factory floor.

“The external dimension of EU migration policy as region-building? Refugee cooperation as contentious politics,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2021

The EU has drawn on its migration policy in the Middle East and North Africa as a method of region-building set to reconfigure a broader EU Mediterranean Neighborhood. At the same time, EU migration policy as a region-building initiative has had contentious, albeit understudied, effects. We know little about either variation in states’ responses to the EU or the contextual dynamics and motives pushing them to challenge EU migration policy as a vector for regulating regions ‘from beyond’. Building on the case of displacement from Syria, the article targets the EU’s refugee approach in its ‘neighborhood’ as a site of contention whereby states, rather than being policy borrowers, dispute the EU’s attempt to regulate regions. The article employs insights from EU refugee cooperation with Lebanon, one of the key regional host states. It shows how Lebanon has sought to contest and adapt the EU’s script of resilience-building, which consists of strengthening governments’ capacity to host refugees ‘within the region’ and at a distance. Looking at EU neighbors as policy agents rather than vessels helps to unravel the tensions underlying the external, regional, and bilateral dimensions of EU migration policy and delineate how these overlapping dimensions play out on the ground.

“Barbaric Women: Race and the Colonization of Gender in Interwar Egypt,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 53(3), 387-405, 2021

This article analyzes the sensationalized media coverage of a serial murder case during the Egyptian revolution of the early interwar era. Despite conflicting evidence, the media blamed the murders on two sisters from southern Egypt named Raya and Sakina. Through a close reading of Egyptian editorials and news reports, I argue that middle-class nationalists constructed Raya and Sakina as barbaric women who threatened to pull the nation back in time in order to legitimize their claim to power. Borrowing from Ann Stoler's analysis of the relationship between race and sexuality and Maria Lugones's concept of the modern/colonial gender system, this article maintains that race was as central to nationalist conceptions of female barbarism as gender, sexuality, and class. The enduring depiction of Raya and Sakina as the quintessential barbaric Egyptian women symbolizes the way in which the modern woman was constructed at the intersection of race and sexuality.

Roundtable: Gendered Transnationalisms in the Middle East and North Africa, Journal of Middle East Women's Studies 17(3), November 2021

Scholarship on gender in the Middle East and North Africa has flourished in the last three decades, fueled in part by JMEWS. Yet much of this work has focused on women’s activism in the context of a single nation-state. Existing scholarship includes hints of women collaborating across national, regional, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, yet it does not foreground these transnational connections or emphasize how formative transnational spaces and conversations were in shaping gender norms. This collection of short essays reveals new modes of movement, organizing, and exchange across borders, focusing on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

When read collectively, the collection of short essays demonstrates the many ways in which women in the Middle East and North Africa collaborated with one another and with women in other world regions in the name of national independence, women’s rights, and economic justice. Syrian women collaborated with Alice Paul, an American feminist, to try to pass an international Equal Rights Treaty. Moroccans referenced examples from Egypt and the Levant as they advocated for gender reform as a part of their anticolonial nationalist activism. Afghan women collaborated with women from Cairo to Bombay. Focusing on models of exchange and activism like these encourages a new spatial framework for understanding women’s organizing. At the same time, the inherent transnational nature of certain spaces, like the Suez Canal and the Ottoman metropole (Istanbul), impacted gendered subjectivities and histories in unique ways. In addition to highlighting the circuits and exchanges of people and ideas, this collection of short essays in conversation with one another on the theme of gendered transnationalism demonstrates how focusing on transnationalisms can push gender history in exciting new directions. These articles brings together a diverse range of scholars whose work focuses on transnational issues and approaches to gender scholarship.

"The Value within Multiform Commodities: North African Phosphates and Global Markets in the Interwar Period," Journal of Global History, 16(3), 315-335, 2021

In critique of histories vesting commodities with the agency to make the modern world, this article traces not the substance but the value embedded within it. By following value, I argue that the ‘commodity’ is not a stable unit of analysis. Rather, commodities are multiform. They can acquire myriad properties when the value embedded within them changes across time and place. During the interwar period, phosphates’ character as a commodity shifted in relation to flows of other goods, movements of labour, global financial exigencies and imperial considerations. By exploring the North African phosphates that enabled capital-intensive farming in Europe, I show how commodities are themselves historical objects whose analytical boundaries and forms change across contexts.