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Research

Trained as a historian, my work engages a broad range of fields that theorize identity and difference, including American Studies, Ethnic Studies, Queer Theory, Performance Studies, and Middle East Studies. Emphasizing and interrogating points of contact between disciplines, I “queer” categories to destabilize assumptions about nation, state, religion, citizenship, class, color, and ideology that often obscure MENA peoples. Most importantly, I frame MENA peoples and their diasporas within a global racial field, as well as shared processes of genocide, displacement, erasure and governance. 

Landscape of small trees and shrubs overlooking the border between Syria and Lebanon
A woman in a trenchcoat examines a tire, while a man looks on, in front of the US Capitol building

This article explores activist Aliya Hassen’s life to identify local, regional, national, and international networks cultivated by MENA Muslims in the United States. The United States was a hub of mid-twentieth-century transnational Arab and Muslim organizing, where many activists promoted an ecumenical understanding of Islam that tackled pressing American concerns like feminism, anti-imperialism, as well as social and racial justice. Because this organizing engaged both Arab and non-Arab American groups, including the Federation of Islamic Associations, Islamic Center of DC, the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, the Nation of Islam, Muslim Mosque, Inc., Ahmadiyya missionaries, and the Muslim World League, it challenges the salience of American racial formations and national frames as meaningful analytical categories. Spanning the historic marginalization of MENA peoples and post-World War II consolidation of Islamophobia in the United States, Hassen's biography demonstrates the ways historical forces surface different ways of "reading" and understanding her life.

Panoramic view through the trees of a seaside town in Lebanon

Unusual Figures: Race, Empire and Unseeing the Global Middle East

My dissertation and first book project tracks the lives of several figures whose experiences shed light on the complex ways Middle Eastern identities have been lived, imagined, and negotiated across the long twentieth century. At first glance, the “unusual figures” I analyze come from very different backgrounds: Calouste Gulbenkian was an Ottoman Armenian oil financier who lived most of his life in Europe; Aliya Hassen was a mid-century Muslim American activist from the Midwest; Palestinian American Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century; and Lebanese Colombian Shakira Mebarak is a global pop music phenomenon. However, drawing on personal papers, multinational corporate archives, popular culture and government documents, I show how these four lives, both singly and together, outline the global racial projects that construct “the Middle East” and its peoples in complex and often deeply problematic ways. Particularly attuned to the tension between how these figures are seen relative to how they see themselves, I show how MENA networks and identities have endured across the twentieth century, even when they have frequently been erased, marginalized and attacked.

Arab Money.jpeg

Rich Muslim, Bad Muslim: The Political Economy of Islamophobia." with Dr. Zaynab Quadri

In this essay, we theorize Islamophobia not as a cogent racism in its own right, but as one civilizational discourse among many that legitimizes the violent disciplining of those who threaten the interests of capitalist imperialism. Specifically, we show that a focus on political economy yields a view of Islamophobia riddled with messy moments of "exception"-- such as when European and American oil companies incorporated Muslims within their profit-seeking ventures, when the U.S. government recruited Islamic allies as bulwarks against Soviet communism, and when lucrative security partnerships in the so-called "War on Terror" drew some in the Islamic world closer to the U.S. while others were subject to violent military action. We argue that together these moments demonstrate deep continuities through the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that hold despite the rupture of 9/11: though Islamophobia became more overtly racialized, Muslims were still eligible for inclusion if their political willingness and access to capital could be deployed in the service of U.S. national security. Islamophobia in the twenty-first century could, in other words, function as a rationalizing heuristic for global U.S. hegemony.

Source: Shiva Ahmadi, Ascend (2017)

Thinking SWANA from the -stans: Armenia and Spivak's Other Asias

In response to a question posed by David Kazanjian and Anahid Kassabian: "Why is there no Armenian postcolonialism?" Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak began research that would become "1994: Will Postcolonialism Travel." This article is at the center of the 2008 edited volume Other Asias, which proposes an epistemic reimagining of continentality, race, religion, nationalism, diaspora and empire. Nearly twenty years later, however, Armenians remained especially fraught subjects in the 2020 California Ethnic Studies Model curriculum. Sketching a personal account of curricular debates alongside Spivak's call to theorize "Other Asias," this essay asks, Why is there no Armenian in Ethnic Studies?

Works in Progress

Ornate Islamicate ceiling with sun peeking through windows

Jubal’s Lyre: A History of the Global Middle East in Sight and Sound

A second book project builds on my performance background to track a sonic history of MENA migration to the Americas, and the layered and conflicting ways this music has been disseminated, silenced, amplified, and/or appropriated. Beginning with the multi-ethnic music of the late Ottoman Empire and its re-creation by Greek, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Armenian, Arab, Turkish and Kurdish musicians in places like New York’s Little Syria and 8th Avenue club scene, as well as immigrant communities in Detroit and Fresno, this project uplifts a shared sonic vocabulary, tracing forgotten continuities through “foreign,” “ethnic” and “world” musics on mainstream record labels; the enduring popularity of belly dancing; the mid-century resurgence of rebetiko, kef, estradayin and arabesk musics; as well as orientalism embraced by non-MENA artists. Rooted in sonic ecumenism and post-Ottoman inter-communalism, this project theorizes a dialectic between institutionalized musicology and funding sources tied to nationalism and “authenticity” in relation to more pliant popular musicking. In doing so, this project breaks new ground by exploring cultural commonplaces in the context of distinct musicological traditions and the painful ruptures of the World Wars, restrictive American immigration policies, and evolving nationalisms in the MENA region.

Image of the author as a serious  3 year-old, bundled in winter clothes holding a bouquet

Memoir

Another project spun off from a dissertation chapter is a deeply historicized memoir of my family’s intentionally murky migrations from Diyarbakir and Aleppo to the Americas.  Following my namesake Tovmas Simsarian’s escape from the Ottoman Empire through smuggling rings in Eastern Anatolia to Armenian receiving colonies in the Middle East, Jersey City, Harlem and Fresno, I use family history to explore the widespread dissemination of US racial theories beginning in the late nineteenth century, alongside equally widespread silences and misrecognitions of MENA diaspora. Flashing forward to my present as queer Floridian born in Bermuda, who saw himself in Shakira, I follow the echoes of these misreadings and erasures through entertainment and academic spaces, where my identities have been similarly uplifted and silenced in radically different ways. Linking the backdrop of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire with a present fraught terrorist watchlists, NSEERS and Muslims bans enacted after 9/11, this multinational project is as much about my coming-of-age in an era of neoliberalism as it is the salience of racialized social engineering in modern governance.

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