Meriam Belli

Meriam N. Belli writes on the social and cultural history of the Middle East. Her first book, An Incurable Past: Nasser's Egypt Now and Then (University Press of Florida, c2013; 2017) explores the 1950s-1960s and their representations within Egyptian society through stories of schooling (national memory); war and effigy-burning on the Suez Canal (local memories); and the apparition of the Virgin Mary (communitarian memories).

She is currently working on a transnational history (Europe, North Africa, and Southwest Asia) that has for purpose to explore modern political and cultural boundaries in the Mediterranean through the lens of the transit of human remains.

Her research interests include oral history/memory, boundaries/mobility, and nationalism/colonialism. Her research areas include: Modern Middle East, Social and Cultural History of the Arab Middle East, Transnational History of Death and Dying, Oral History and Memory, Boundaries and Mobility

The Space and Place of Death in the Postcolonial City

“The Space and Place of Death in the Postcolonial City” uses the prism of death and the disposal of bodies as a means of reflecting on the reciprocal relation of urbanity and religion, while tending, most particularly, to subaltern and marginalized groups produced by (de)colonization. I contend that within urban spaces, what I call funerary modalities—how and where people dispose of and care for the dead—delineate the space and place of the living. Such modalities point to who does and who does not belong to the group—be it religious or profane, local or national. These modalities define material and immaterial boundaries—the boundaries of the living and the dead. They show the intersections of, and the competition between religious and urban culture and practices.

My work project for Erfurt explores some aspects of my ongoing research about death, belonging, and boundaries. In the age of global migration and citizenship (late 19th century-early 21st century), how do individuals and groups conceive of boundaries/spaces/territories of the dead– and how do such boundaries in turn outline the inclusion or exclusion of the living? To what extent can we say, as Foucault does, that funerary spaces figure as a synecdoche of urban spaces, and the city as a synecdoche of the polity, when funerary spaces are simultaneously inside and outside urban spaces?

Global migration and citizenship seemingly challenge if not reverse the proposition of co-spatiality. Indeed, one might feel just as much at home in two (or more) distinct national spaces. What underlies, for example, the decision of a Muslim or a Jew to live in a French city, yet be buried in another, be it Jerusalem, Tunis, or Oran? Does one territory represent the physical space of one’s earthly life and the other the metaphysical space of one’s afterlife? Is one space profane and the other sacred? What is the weight of political and legal institutions on one’s decision about one’s burial or the spatialization of one’s remains in the afterlife? How do funerary and mortuary urban configurations, spaces and places of death (the cemetery or the mortuary chapel) impart or create religious solidarity and exclusion?

Publications

“The Ethno-Necrocratic State: Mamillah and the Afterlives of Ethnocracy in Israel.” Peer reviewed article, International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES), Fall 2022.

“United They Lay: Cemeteries and Community in the Isthmus Cities of Late 19th-Early 20th Century Egypt.” Peer reviewed article, in L'Isthme et l'Egypte au temps de la Compagnie Maritime du Canal de Suez. Edited by Claudine Piaton. Cairo: Institut Français d'Archéologie Orientale (IFAO), June 2016.