2021-2024
Tracing Emancipation under Rubbles of War: Popular Histories of North African Laborers from the Fronts of World War I to Revolution
This project retrieves and reveals the journeys of North African Laborers in imperial armies across the geographies of World War I, tracing the growing political consciousness reflected through their songs and stories and culminating in revolts whose legacies, despite invisibility, persist until this very day.
Tracing Emancipation under Rubbles of War is a critical inquiry into a global history of transregional solidarity and resistance amongst migrant workers in a war-torn world. More than a million low ranking soldiers and workers from colonized regions were sent to the battle-fields of World War I by the Entente powers and the British military respectively. The project explores their experiences on the fronts of the World War through their own voices, in oral and archival songs and memoirs, from longings, to solidarities to political resistance. Mossallam follows the trails of dispersed archives left by these laborers from the times they were taken through their journeys across Europe, and the miraculous ways they made it back home, whether physically or through their ideas of changing the world order that sent them to war. These years of war (particularly 1916-1918) were also years of significant revolts in many countries, including Egypt, Algeria, the Upper Volta, Mozambique and all the way to Germany or Russia. The retrieved experiences will thus help us understand the growing political consciousness and transregional exchange of ideas and strategies for resistance and revolt. The stories of these laborers and those of their journeys connected the world at a moment of multiplying geographic divisions, and Mossallam argues that an anti-colonial geography of the world based on relations of solidarity and ideas of emancipation rather than national boundaries and imperial realities can be revealed. The project’s research outcomes are to be produced in writings as well as interactive formats such as public history workshops.
2020/ 2021
This is What Socialism Looks Like: A Popular History of the Building of the Aswan High Dam 1960-1970
It is said that the ‘high’ of the Aswan High Dam is a misnomer. Standing at 111 meters high and a kilometer wide, the embankment Dam’s ‘height’ refers more to its being a technical and political feat. Built during a period of heightened socialist nationalism, its construction relied on peasants who had never dealt with machinery, and funding that required Soviet assistance and the nationalization of the Suez Canal – instigating a war with imperial powers and embedding it in Cold war politics. The Dam thus became a testament for decolonization, national liberation, and modernity. In looking at the building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt in the 1960s, Alia Mossallam explores how this large industrial project that employed 36,000 builders and displaced 100,000 of the indigenous Nubian communities in its wake ‘brought Socialism’ to the city of Aswan. She explores how ideologies can be built, physically manifested in certain communities in the context of populist socialist revolutions. And how, in believing in these ‘revolutionary truths’, workers and displaced communities were willing to ‘suspend disbelief’ in often contradictory ideological values.
2019/ 2020
What Does Socialism Sound Like?A Popular History of the Building of the Aswan High Dam 1960-1970
It is said that the ‘high’ of the Aswan High Dam is a misnomer. Standing at 111 meters high and a kilometer wide, the embankment Dam’s ‘height’ refers more to its being a technical and political feat. Built during a period of heightened socialist nationalism, its construction relied on peasants who had never dealt with machinery, and funding that required Soviet assistance and the nationalization of the Suez Canal - instigating a war with imperial powers and embedding it in Cold war politics. The Dam thus became a testament for decolonization, national liberation, and modernity.
In looking at the building of the Aswan High Dam in Egypt in the 1960s – I explore how this large industrial project that employed 36,000 builders and displaced 100,000 of the indigenous Nubian communities in its wake ‘brought Socialism’ to the city of Aswan. I explore how ideologies can be built, physically manifested in certain communities in the context of populist socialist revolutions. And how in believing in these ‘revolutionary truths’ workers and displaced communities are willing to ‘suspend disbelief’ in often contradictory ideological values.
My insight into the Dam building experience comes through the stories of the workers who participated in the most labour intensive period of Dam building between 1960 and 1964, and various Nubian communities who were displaced in 1964. I explore their experiences through Oral history interviews, but specifically through songs through which they have documented their experiences – songs sung mainly within the communities, and are thus not necessarily recorded. I also look at the vast array of images that these different worker and Nubian communities have kept of their struggles, and insisted on giving me while I was conducting my research.
In addition to exploring the process of Dam building as an ideological endeavor therefore, this work looks at ‘popular historiographic practices’ – how communities document their experiences during controversial or tumultuous political events when they have been written out of the grand historical narratives. I look at both songs and images as vocabulary – as intimate languages that communities create to maintain their stories amongst themselves and relay them from generation to generation – not to an outside world who may or may not understand, but for themselves, so they never forget.
A pressing overarching question thus becomes how knowledge of the past can be preserved through sensory archive. I ask how as historians we can reproduce historical narratives that are more faithful to the forms and structures of knowledge that we access. How are the sound-scapes associated with the building of the Dam, and the images, maps and plans of inundated communities, villages and houses significant to our understanding of the past and of industrial and water histories?
2017-2019
‘Hekāyāt Sha’b – Stories of Peoplehood’: Nasserism, Popular Politics and Songs in Egypt (1956-1974)
“The simsimiyya gives voice to those whom history forgets” – Ibrahim al-Mursi (poet, Port Said)
This research is driven by an interest in alternative narratives of the 1952 Military Coup in Egypt – an event widely celebrated as a revolution and that continues to influence people's general consciousness of the role of the military in revolutionary politics until this day. For my study I chose to explore the main milestones of this "Revolution", namely the 1956 war on Port Said (The Suez War), the building of the Aswan High Dam and the duration of the war of attrition in Suez (between the 1967 Six Day War and 1973 Yom Kippur). My aim however was to research the popular experiences behind these events; the experiences of the popular resistance in the wars in Port Said and Suez, and the stories of the builders of the High Dam and the Nubians displaced by it.
The study thus contributes to an alternative understanding of the politics behind the revolution. What was the popular involvement of every-day people in this monumental event? To what extent were the Nasserist ideas hegemonic? Why did people take on these ideas and why were they willing to sacrifice for them? Relying mainly on ethnography, my research explored these experiences through the songs people sang about each of these events, through researching intimate languages within each of the communities I explored. The study thus informs, in a theoretical sense, the questions of: How do people document their experiences when they are written out of mainstream history? What can oral forms of popular culture and intimate languages (songs, poetry, idioms), tell us about the histories of communities that cannot 'write' their histories? Seven years into the 2011 revolution, Mossallam revises her PhD thesis to illustrate a hidden legacy of popular struggle that persists till this day, despite the attempts by nationalist and military histories to overpower them.
