Oral Presentation Session

Reviewed by: Society for Cultural Anthropology

Of interest to: Students

Primary Theme: Resistance

Secondary Theme: Immigration/Migration/Citizenship

(3-1170) Kurdish Laborers, Armenian Survivors, African Domestic Workers: Stories of Escape in the Middle East

Escape, writes philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, is “the need to get out of oneself, that is, to break that most radical and unalterably binding of chains, the fact that the I is oneself.” Levinas locates the disquiet and dissatisfaction of the self with the need to transcend the limits of finite being at the heart of subjectivity. He conceptualizes the need to escape as the most fundamental element of the human condition: being is that which harbors the potential of multiple and open-ended becomings; a self that is in constant flux. How might we begin from Levinas’s philosophical account to consider the multiple and diverse ways people escape from conditions of violence, political and economic inequalities, gender normativity, labor regimes, or simply the weight of everyday life? In this panel, we explore examples of escape among marginalized subjects living in the contemporary Middle East. Accounts of escapes abound in the region —from villages to cities, from poverty to prosperity, from oppression to freedom, from war/violence to safety, from death to life, and from chaos to order, but also from order back to chaos. The papers on this panel use the framework of escape in order to complicate binaries of choice versus obligation, departure versus stasis, or resistance versus subjection. Instead we find forms of partial survival, reconstructed memory, and historic contingency in the routes of fugitives. By considering stories of escape amongst refugees, genocide survivors, laborers, and guerrillas, we focus on both the forms of individual and collective agency that are forged in flight, as well as the structures of domination from which these patterns of escape arise.

Organizer(s)

• Deniz Duruiz

  Columbia University

Presenter(s)

• Deniz Duruiz

  Columbia University

Organizer(s)

• Onur GUNAY

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Princeton University

Presenter(s)

• Onur GUNAY

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Princeton University

Chair(s)

• Sumayya Kassamali

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Tufts University

Presenter(s)

• Sumayya Kassamali

  Postdoctoral Fellow
  Tufts University

• Melissa Bilal

  University of Chicago

Discussant(s)

• S. Sengul

  CNES Distinguished Research Fellow
  UCLA

Presentations:

• 4:15 PM - 4:30 PM

  How Kurdish Women Fight and Flee
  Deniz Duruiz – Columbia University
• 4:30 PM - 4:45 PM

  On Escape and Subjectivity
  Onur GUNAY – Princeton University
• 4:45 PM - 5:00 PM

  Fieldwork in Flight
  Sumayya Kassamali – Tufts University
• 5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

  The Violence of Forgiveness: Stories of Escape from a Central Anatolian Village
  Melissa Bilal – University of Chicago
• 5:15 PM - 5:30 PM

  Discussion
  S. Ruken Sengul – UCLA