03/04/2026
Speaker: Professor Adrien Z***r
Nakba: Catastrophic Ideation and the Meanings of Disaster (1895-1948)
Friday 6 March, 3-5PM, Bancroft Building 200B
For zoom registration click the link in our bio!
Abstract: This talk examines the formation of “nakba” as a concept of disaster and a social practice of catastrophic ideation in Arabic. Contrary to the prevailing assumption, the genealogy of nakba does not begin in 1948 Palestine but stretches into the Ottoman Empire past. I go back to nineteenth-century constructions when nakba referred to medieval episodes of downfall, and trace how Arab publics redeployed them during the Hamidian massacres (1894–97), the Armenian/Assyrian Genocide (1915), and colonial wars, including the Great Syrian Revolt (1925) and the Great Arab Revolt (1936–39). These events entrenched a structure of the imagination that enmeshed nakba with social formation and political action, in echo with a wider conceptual landscape of catastrophe. I then turn to 1948 Palestine, when the Nakba prompted Arab social scientists to redefine selfhood, sovereignty, and objectivity. This stratified pre-1948 genealogy reveals how catastrophic ideation generated sites of memory and practices of oblivion across Arabic, Turkish, Armenian, and English since the nineteenth-century.
Co-sponsored by the Hearing Palestine Initiative & the Seminar in Ottoman and Turkish Studies
Michael E. Marmura Lecture Series in Arabic Studies | Department of Near & Middle Eastern Civilizations
