This talk will present Labanieh’s overall book project on colonial conspiracies and their afterlives in 20th century Middle Eastern literature and media, as well as new research for her fourth and final chapter on depictions of the regime's secret services informant (al-mukhber) in the cultural memory of Baathist Syria and Iraq (70s-90s). The chapter examines plays, novels, poems, and political tracts that were produced by dissident cultural figures such as Mohammad al-Maghout, Fadhil al-Azzawi, Saadallah Wannous, and Nazik al-Malaika, and that address—directly or obliquely—the taboo yet ambient figure of the mukhabarat informant. What role does the informant play in the cultural imaginary of this time? What does he show us about the political transition from subjects of colonial power to citizens of the security state? The chapter builds on existing scholarship on “mukhabarat culture” in Baathist Syria, while considering what insights can be gained from a comparative approach across the region’s security regimes. It likewise explores how state surveillance reshapes society, and the role of theatricality in cultural production under dictatorship.
Aya Labanieh is a scholar of empire, conspiracy theory, media, and memory culture. She received her Ph.D. in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, with a dissertation entitled One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Literature and Media (2025). She is presently a research fellow at EUME and SYRASP at the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin, and this August she will be starting a postdoctoral fellowship at Northwestern University in Qatar. She has published in, among others, Poetics Today, Journal of Arabic Literature, Journal of Medical Humanities, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing, alongside public-facing venues such as Aeon and the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Eli Osheroff is a historian of the modern Middle East, with a focus on the history of Arab-Zionist relations. His first book, based on his doctoral dissertation, is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute and deals with Arab political imagination from the late Ottoman period to 1948. The book focuses on Arab visions for an independent Palestine and the place of Jewish settlers in the future Arab state. Eli is also a regular contributor to the Forum for Regional Thinking, a think tank of Israeli Middle East scholars seeking to understand Israel’s place in the region from a critical perspective. In the academic years 2025-27, he is a Minerva Fellow at EUME.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
