ANN: New and Forthcoming Publications

The Constantinople Woman’s College was one of the most influential institutions of higher learning for women in the Middle East in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. College President Mary Mills Patrick arrived in Anatolia in the 1870s to evangelize, but she distanced herself from Christian proselytism in order to create a “cosmopolitan” college for all Ottoman women. Her goal of modernizing Ottoman society by promoting American-style democracy and feminism were welcomed by many, and Patrick’s reputation as educator protected the College through the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid and the 1908 Young Turk Revolution. Cosmopolitan harmony, however, was severely tested during the Balkan Wars and World War One. Although Patrick and the college emerged intact, the aftermath of the Armenian massacres and deportations and Turkey’s rising nationalism forced her to abandon her cosmopolitan ideal. This book traces Patrick’s evolving narratives of her College’s transition from missionary to cosmopolitan to ethnonational, revealing a unique perspective on a transformative period in the Middle East.

Born in 1920 on the edge of Tunis’s Jewish quarter, the French-Jewish-Tunisian sociologist, philosopher, and novelist Albert Memmi has been a central figure in colonial and postcolonial studies. Often associated with the anticolonial struggles of the 1950s and 1960s, Memmi’s career has spanned fifty years, more than twenty book-length publications, and hundreds of articles that are distilled in this collection. The Albert Memmi Reader presents Memmi’s insights on the legacies of the colonial era, critical theories of race, and his distinctive story. Memmi’s novels and essays feature not only decolonial struggles but also commentary on race, the psychology of dependence, and what it means to be Jewish.  This reader includes selections from his classic works, such as The Pillar of Salt and The Colonizer and the Colonized, as well as previously untranslated pieces that punctuate Memmi’s literary life and career, and illuminate the full arc of the life of one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century. Selections from his later works speak directly to contemporary issues in European, African, and Middle Eastern studies, such as racism, immigration and European identity, and the struggles of postcolonial states, including Israel/Palestine.

Does foreign aid promote human rights? As the world’s largest aid donor, the United States has provided foreign assistance to more than 200 countries. Deploying global numerical data on US foreign aid and comparative historical analysis of America’s post–Cold War foreign policies in Southeast Asia, Aid Imperium provides the most comprehensive explanation that links US strategic assistance to physical integrity rights outcomes in recipient countries, particularly in ways that previous quantitative studies have systematically ignored. The book innovatively highlights the active political agency of Global South states and actors as they negotiate and chart their political trajectories with the United States as the core state of the international system. Drawing from theoretical insights in the humanities and the social sciences as well as a wide range of empirical documents, Aid Imperium is the first multidisciplinary study to explain how US foreign policy affects state repression and physical integrity rights outcomes in Southeast Asia and the rest of the Global South.

Gaston Chérau (1872-1937), a novelist from the Belle Époque and an amateur photographer, became a war correspondent during the Italo-Turkish conflict about Libya (1911-1912). His 230 photographs (taken in Tripoli and Tunis), his articles in the newspaper Le Matin, his private correspondence and a reminiscent text published in 1926 reveal how this neophyte faced a war in a colonial context. Being somewhere else confronted him with the prospect of being dead and far from home. By immersing us in the work and daily life of a reporter in the early days of photojournalism, this unpublished documentation and its historical analysis reveal how this witness is tugged between his mission to report events and his manipulation by the belligerents and newspapers. It shows how this experience condenses multiple issues - mainly economic, political and ethical - linked to the making of current events. It is only by restoring the share that belongs to each of the protagonists in the construction of the journalistic narrative that we can measure the way in which the war correspondent, a singular witness generally unquestioned in the historiography of war, engages his responsibility. This documentation is also a new source contributing to the historiography of European colonialism, North Africa and the Ottoman Empire as well as a testimony to daily life in war time. The second short part of the book offers a reflective analysis of the "Splitting the Hardest Heart" (« A fendre le cœur le plus dur ») project, which led to the sharing of this historical source with artists and an exhibition. These artists are two writers, Jérôme Ferrari (Goncourt Prize 2012) and Oliver Rohe, a visual artist, Agnès Geoffray, and a dancer-choreographer, Emmanuel Eggermont. The production of the exhibition brought the archive into resonance with these creations and the works of other contemporary artists who have addressed the issue of witness and violence of war in different contexts.