An Ottoman tragedy: history and historiography at play

In the space of six years early in the seventeenth century, the Ottoman Empire underwent such turmoil and trauma - the assassination of the young ruler Osman II, the re-enthronement and subsequent abdication of his mad uncle Mustafa I, for a start - that a scholar pronounced the period's three-day-long dramatic climax "an Ottoman Tragedy." Under Gabriel Piterberg's deft analysis, this period of crisis becomes a historical laboratory for the history of the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century - an opportunity to observe the dialectical play between history as an occurrence and experience and history as a recounting of that experience. Piterberg reconstructs the Ottoman narration of this fraught period from the foundational text, produced in the early 1620s, to the composition of the state narrative at the end of the seventeenth century. His work brings theories of historiography into dialogue with the actual interpretation of Ottoman historical texts, and forces a rethinking of both Ottoman historiography and the Ottoman state in the seventeenth century. A provocative reinterpretation of a major event in Ottoman history, this work reconceives the relation between historiography and history

Wakefield, Marx, and the world turned inside out

This article focuses on Edward Gibbon Wakefield's theory of colonization, on Karl Marx's response to it, and on the role that settler colonialism as a global phenomenon played in shaping their thought. Marx's rejoinder to Wakefield's interpretation of an episode in the early colonization of Western Australia, when servants had deserted a wealthy colonist, was a foundational moment in the development of his general argument. Wakefield's reaction to that episode was to develop the theory of 'systematic colonization', which he also proposed as an antidote to the prospect of impending revolution. Marx's notion of primitive accumulation was entwined with his reading of Wakefield's project. We argue that their different approaches to colonization, the prospect of settling 'empty lands' in other continents, can be seen as the starting points of two different political traditions. While revolutionary traditions are well known, this article outlines another global tradition, a political tradition that refuses reaction and revolution equally, and envisages displacement as the best method to produce social transformation

Prison Israel-Palestine: Literalities of Criminalization and Imaginative Resistance

This article offers a reflection on the Palestinian experience of imprisonment. It begins by addressing the settler logic of criminalization and goes on to identify how this criminalization extends to the systematic thwarting of resistance. In engaging with different kinds of prison writing and art, it further explores the relationship between the literality of imprisonment and the imagination as a question of collective consciousness

Settler-Colonialism, Memoricide and Indigenous Toponymic Memory: The Appropriation of Palestinian Place Names by the Israeli State

Cartography, place-naming and state-sponsored explorations were central to the modern European conquest of the earth, empire building and settler-colonisation projects. Scholars often assume that place names provide clues to the historical and cultural heritage of places and regions. This article uses social memory theory to analyse the cultural politics of place-naming in Israel. Drawing on Maurice Halbwachs’ study of the construction of social memory by the Latin Crusaders and Christian medieval pilgrims, the article shows Zionists’ toponymic strategies in Palestine, their superimposition of Biblical and Talmudic toponyms was designed to erase the indigenous Palestinian and Arabo-Islamic heritage of the land. In the pre-Nakba period Zionist toponymic schemes utilised nineteenth century Western explorations of Biblical ‘names’ and ‘places’ and appropriated Palestinian toponyms. Following the ethnic cleansing of Palestine in 1948, the Israeli state, now in control of 78 percent of the land, accelerated its toponymic project and pursued methods whose main features were memoricide and erasure. Continuing into the post-1967 occupation, these colonial methods threaten the destruction of the diverse historical cultural heritage of the land