By Kira Logan
Memories tied to land are key drivers in politics and infrastructure in the Middle East, a panel of UC Santa Barbara scholars said at a graduate panel on memory, dispossession and markets in different areas of the region.
“How do we trace memory in a place never meant to be preserved?” said Camilla Falanesca, a Ph.D candidate in the Department of History who spoke on the “memory economy,” and how remembering shapes land use in El Borma, Tunisia.
Falanesca was speaking as part of The Center for Middle East Studies Spotlight Series which features current research by faculty and students, with the aim of diversifying interdisciplinary programs at UCSB.
Over the last five years, The Center for Middle East Studies has expanded support for graduate student scholarship, prioritizing graduate students through this series.
History Ph.D. candidate Camilla Falanesca is one of three panelists who spoke at a recent Center of Middle East Studies Spotlight Series at UCSB.
Falanesca was joined at the recent Spotlight event by two other Ph.D. candidates, Giovanni Vimercati and bridge mcwaid, who also spoke about their research. Vimercati has studied the economics of film production in Beirut, Lebanon. bridge mcwaid went over her research into the fish market in Palestine from the 1920s to the 1950s, to highlight how food scarcity and maritime management impacted civilians.
Falanesca’s work, partially based on examining a Tunisian oilfield, not only looks at memory but how memory can be translated into databases and kept for future research.
“Part of my dissertation research explores political economy through the study of infrastructures, memories, bodies, and environments. Today I focus on an oilfield called El Borma, to trace the relationship between infrastructure and the environment,” she said.
El Borma is on the Saharan border, the first and largest oil field in Tunisia. This lake is primarily used for oil drilling and is filled with biochemical waste: benzene, mercury, and lead is slowly seeping into the desert sediment.
Because it is located in a militarized zone, El Borma is neglected and invisible to the public eye, becoming a “counter-archive to the narrative of progress.”
Giovanni Vimercati, a Ph.D. candidate in Film and Media Studies at UCSB, researches film distribution in Beirut, Lebanon and was featured in a recent panel held by the UCSB Center for Middle East Studies.
“Yet it still holds memory,” said Falanesca. “Not in paper, but in sludge.”
Falanesca uses El Borma as her prime example to argue in her research: political and economic systems in the Middle East are shaped by ecological relations.
She says there is a common misconception about the Middle East’s political economy: that empty nature serves as a background for human life and that nature cannot or should not stand on its own – which creates an artificial division between nature and humans.
“There is a complex web of people as well as nonhuman actors which contribute to the distributed historical agency of nature in the Middle East,” said Falanesca.
History Ph.D. candidate bridge mcwaid discussed her research on the fish market, food scarcity, and maritime management in mid-20th century Palestine at a recent event held by UCSB’s Center for Middle East Studies.
In El Borma’s database, the data is grounded on oil as a historical agent and there is geography traced through infrastructure which is logged in the database. “Ecology, memory, and political economy are all interconnected in El Borma,” said Falanesca.
She says researchers are crucial in deciding what relationships matter between land and memory.
“El Borma emerges as a story of industrial and diplomatic achievement,” Falanesca said. “As historians, we must take these hopes seriously — not simply as an excuse for capital making, but as historical forces. Aspirations, dreams, and belief in development, shape policies, infrastructures, and entire imaginaries of the future.”.
Another panelist, Giovanni Vimercati has researched the political economy of film and media in Beirut, Lebanon, focusing on distribution and exhibition.
Vimercati studies Beirut as a film capital. He critiques the typical “North to South” or “West to East” models of film circulation. Instead, he proposes a “peripheral market” concept, stressing the economic influence of colonial powers on the development of the Lebanese film industry and film market circulation.
One of the questions at the center of Vimercati’s work is why Lebanon’s film industry developed a strong film distribution screening apparatus, rather than focusing on filmmaking during the mid 1950s to 1975.
“Simply put, why did Lebanese watch so many different films but produce so few of them?” said Vimercati.
Beirut’s film market can be understood in terms of the Middle East’s political economy, he said.
Making films in Lebanon was strictly policed by the government and film distribution was always in the hands of Levantine entrepreneurs, which made it less mainstream. Beirut’s merchant bourgeoisie made no effort to support film production since trade networks predated the French Mandate, and the Mandate caused the film industry to take off in the sale and circulation of films.
“At the same time, Beirut was also the financial capital of the Arab world and a banking hub for the whole region,” Vimercati said.
He said Beirut’s diverse cinemas, which screened films from around the world, cannot be separated from the influence of colonial powers —all part of the land’s historical and spatial memory.
“While Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and other Arab countries sought to bolster their own film production by restricting or even prohibiting the entry of American movies into their theaters, Beirut maintained an open-door policy for US films,” Vimercati said.
Beirut boasted the highest per capita rate of cinema attendance in the Arab world during the Cold War era, he said, leading to an increasingly diverse film landscape.
“There is thriving diversity and internationalism that characterized Beirut’s film culture,” Vimercati said.
Falanesca ended the panel by expressing gratitude on behalf of other graduate researchers for the opportunity to study a region through the lens of time and place and collaborate with others to advance analytical frameworks.
“If there is something I want to conclude with, it is this: that to do a Ph.D. in humanities can be experimental, collective, and profoundly generative,” she said, “that scholarship can emerge not just from interpretation, but from building, from designing, from method as a mode of inquiry.”
She said graduate work “gains strength not from arriving at final answers, but from creating the conditions to think differently, and to do so together.”
Kira Logan is a third-year UC Santa Barbara student majoring in English. She is a Web and Social Media Intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.