Rediscovering Lost Pasts: Spatial Approaches to Middle Eastern History, Bridging Theoretical and GIS Analysis

AHA Session 213
Saturday, January 9, 2027: 1:30 PM-3:00 PM
Studio 2 (New Orleans Marriott, 2nd Floor)
Chair:
Nora Barakat, Stanford University
Papers:
Reconstructing a Lost Site: Spatial History, Memory, and the Ottoman Imperial Slave Market in Istanbul
Musa Kazim Azimli, University of Virginia
The New Geographies of Aramco’s Infrastructural Projects
Ritika Lal, New York University
Toward a Spatiotemporal Narrative Approach to Kuwait’s 20th- and 21st-Century Urban History
Rawan Hayat, New York University
Refining Manhood: Spatial Coloniality, Industrial Sexuality, and the “Company Man” in Abadan, 1942–52
Yidi Zhang, New York University
Comment:
Nora Barakat, Stanford University

Session Abstract

Researching and producing academic scholarship on the Middle East tends to come with a range of unique methodological challenges regardless of geographic region or time period, relating to the accessibility (and destruction) of sources. To highlight new ways of thinking about less easily told histories, this session brings together presentations on digital and non-technical approaches to urban spatial history in the Middle East. Each paper engages with the theme of reconstructing lost pasts and the relationship between space and (changing) order. The presentations here range from the early modern Ottoman Middle East to the post-oil modern world, each grappling with different methodological challenges, and illustrating a new way of demonstrating and making sense of spatial transformations.

The first two presentations use GIS and digital humanities alongside traditional historical materials to reconstruct maps in new ways, and thus bridge visual and technical spatial analysis. The “Reconstructing a Lost Site: Spatial History, Memory, and the Ottoman Imperial Slave Market in Istanbul” presentation reconstructs the lost slave markets and shows the relationship between historical forgetting and the changing landscape. “The New Geographies of Aramco’s Infrastructural Projects of the 1950s” reflects on changing points of infrastructural connectivity, to show how a new geography was brought into being through the development projects of the Arabian-American Oil Company in the 1950s.

The last two presentations use theoretical approaches to urban planning to critically rethink the notion of ‘moments’ versus ‘processes’ of change, and how they produce new historical objects. “Beyond Linear Narratives: a Cyclical Creative-Destruction Approach to Urban Transformation in Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Kuwait” challenges the pre-oil/post-oil binary and shows the cyclical nature of futuristic and nostalgic aesthetics, alongside discarded pasts. “Refining Manhood: Spatial Coloniality, Industrial Sexuality, and the "Company Man" in Abadan (1942–1952)” examines how Iran’s nationalization of oil in 1951 represented a dismantling of a gendered, biopolitical urban planning regime.

These presentations together offer new ways of thinking about space and spatial analysis, with the aim of provoking a larger discussion about the use of non-technical, theoretical ways of approaching space and the digital humanities. What does each make possible, and what questions remain unanswered? What does each reveal about the making of political order, temporal categorizations, historical subjectivities, and historical memory? Through these explorations of the myriad ways in which space has been destroyed, reinvented, repurposed, and reclaimed, this panel invites a deeper discussion about approaches to understanding the significance of space.

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