Migration and the Cosmpolitan Cities of North Africa and the Levant

Assigned Readings:

Will Hanley, “Grieving Cosmopolitanism in Middle East Studies,” History Compass 6 (2008).

Khaled Fahmy, “For Cavafy, with Love and Squalor: Some Critical Notes on the History and Historiography of Modern Alexandria,” in Alexandria: Real and Imagined, ed. Anthony Hirst and Michael Silk (Ashgate, 2004).

Primary Source: The guide from E.M. Forster, Alexandria: A History and a Guide.
You should try to skim through the entire guide; but for the purposes of class discussion focus on sections 2 to 5 (pp. 134 to 182).

Seminar Questions:

Who migrated to Mediterranean port cities and why?
Explore the spatial dimension of ethnic diversity.
As applied to eastern Mediterranean and north African cities of this period, is the term “cosmopolitan” as inclusive as it sounds?

Further Reading:

For a general background to migration in the nineteenth-century Mediterranean, I highly recommend browsing the following book (available as e-book via library): in particular chapter 2.

Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (University of California Press, 2011).

Zeynep Çelik, Urban Forms and Colonial Confrontations: Algiers under French Rule (University of California Press, 1997).

Hala Halim, Alexandrian Cosmopolitanism: An Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).

Samir Kassir, Beirut (University of California Press, 2010).

Philip Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (John Murray, 2011).

Mark Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews, 1430-1950 (Harper, 2005).

Michael Reimer, Colonial Bridgehead: Government and Society in Alexandria, 1807-1882 (American University in Cairo Press, 1997).

Deborah Starr, Remembering Cosmopolitan Egypt: Literature, Culture and Empire (Routledge, 2013).

Sibel Zandi-Sayek, Ottoman Izmir: The Rise of a Cosmopolitan Port, 1840-1880 (University of Minnesota Press, 2012).