Hope, Waiting, and Ethnographies of the ‘Not Yet’ from a Global Middle East

Sheraton 

Room: Grand Ballroom E (5th fl) 

"I am going to marry her," boasts a 19-year-old man living in Gaza. When? I ask. "After the war." More than four-hundred days after Israel's 2023 ceaseless bombardment and blockade of Gaza had begun, he was anticipating its end. An end that would mark the beginning of the next chapter of his life. He waits, with hope for an end, to genocide. This roundtable considers "hope" and "waiting" as categories of analysis for everyday life in the Global Middle East–a transnational geography that accommodates the global circulation of people, ideas, and goods from this region. It explores what everyday actors in this global geography are "waiting for" or "waiting on", whether this waiting is active or passive, shedding light on their power and control over possibilities. It examines the temporal politics and poetics of waiting in a region that contends with authoritarianism, colonial violence, migration, and neoliberalism. Waiting in these contexts leads many to depression and hopelessness and also to creativity and innovation. This roundtable asks how people across this region (and its diasporas) experience and manage waiting and hope differently. Waiting, for some, hinges on the hope for better social, political, legal, and economic conditions. But what happens when waiting leads to perpetual deterioration of all of these conditions for everyday actors who are the subjects of neoliberal structural and institutional forces? What can one hope for? Can one organize around a politics of hope under such conditions? What does a consciousness of that which has not yet arrived look like for those waiting for a better future just beyond reach?

Affect

Ethnogeography

Middle East

Middle East Section