Wednesday's Read: Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East

Chatty, Dawn. Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East. (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010)
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Dawn Chatty's Displacement and Dispossession in the Modern Middle East (2010) is a needed contribution to the scholarship on marginalized peoples in the Middle East: ethnic groups without states like the Palestinians and Kurds; peoples who have been subject to expulsion and forced migration because of war and shifting borders, including the Chechnyans and Circassians; and those who are caught between and across battle lines, including all of the aforementioned groups, as well as Armenians and others. Because these are the stories of marginalized peoples, many by definition lacking opportunities to establish formal archives or to gain access to formalized, government-subsidized documentation, they are little-told. Chatty's work is intended as a corrective to this lack.  Displacement is a result of interviews she conducted with people representing many of the above-named groups.

Before discussing the experiences and perspectives of displaced peoples, however, Chatty spends two chapters -  nearly a third of her overall text - introducing the recent history of the Middle East and the nineteenth century events that led to so much displacement. This was by far the weakest portion of the book, as she rehearses in general terms the story of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, making references to various theories about decline and stagnation in a way that, though accurate, lacks focus. One gets the impression that she felt compelled to provide a good deal of contextual grounding for readers who are new to the area, and that she may have bitten off more than she could chew in her attempt to make nineteenth century Ottoman history comprehensible and digestible. The result is an introductory section that is simultaneously vague and belabored. Fortunately, the rest of the text, comprised of the interviews themselves, is much stronger, deeply compelling work.

Chapter three begins with a personal narrative of a Circassian man, describing his expulsion from the Caucasus and eventual settlement in Damascus. Over five million Circassians were displaced in the nineteenth century, and of those who were forced out, only 500,000 survived the exodus. Their's is a story of heartbreaking loss and suffering.