par Cyrus Schayegh, Professor at the Geneva Graduate Institute, Visiting professor MSH

Le Séminaire des Mondes Musulmans et Arabes Contemporains (SMMAC) de l'OMAM et le REPI ont le plaisir d'accueillir M. Cyrus Schayegh, historien au Geneva Graduate Institute depuis 2017, pour une conférence intitulée "Transimperial comparisons at empires end"

A new approach to modern history is crystallizing: transimperial history. Until around 2000, most historians of empires, especially Western ones, studied them in separation: a “methodological empire-ism” related to methodological nationalism. Then, some historians reframed metropolitan-colonial relationships, emphasizing intra-imperial linkages as much as hierarchies. Building on this revision and on global history, for a good decade now scholars have been studying themes as varied as war, race, labor, and policy-making that involve actors operating between and across several empires.

This conference will turn around this fascinating developing field of history. The author will present a paper project, which working title is “Transimperial comparisons at empire’s end: France, Algeria, the United States, and native Americans in letters and comics (1950s).” It shows how complexly actors in the late French empire (1950s) situated themselves in comparison to multiple intertwined others, foremostly the rising US empire. Underlying this complexity was the fact that both France and the United States were multi-dimensional in the eye of the French comparison-making beholder. The United States was three things at once (a nation-state, settler colony, and a rising empire) and France, four things: a polity dominated by the US empire, a nation-state, a nation-state-settler-colony one might call France-Algeria, and an empire. It relies on the study of four intertwined dimensions of this story. France-as-an-empire was compared with the United States-as-an-empire through an Algerian prism. Comparisons with America as a nation-state-settler-colony structured how people thought about France-Algeria. Algerians’ nature vis-à-vis France and French policies vis-à-vis them were considered through the lens of native Americans. And the ambiguous figure of the native American reflected worries and hopes about France’s place in a US-dominated world.

Cyrus Schayegh (PhD, Columbia University, 2004) has been Professor of International History at the Geneva Graduate Institute (IHEID) since 2017. Before, he was Associate Professor at Princeton University and Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut. His most recent books are the monograph The Middle East and the Making of the Modern World (Harvard UP, 2017) and the edited volume Globalizing the U.S. Presidency: Postcolonial Views of John F. Kennedy (Bloomsbury, 2020). He is currently working on three projects. One concerns transimperial history, and includes an introductory book to that field and two edited volumes resulting from a conference he organized at IHEID in spring 2022. Another project is a series of article-length case studies on modern global Middle Eastern history and a related collection of primary sources that will be published at the open-access Wilson Center Digital Archive. He is editing that collection. (A first collection―he built and translated himself.) Finally, a third project involves editing The Cambridge Companion to the Cold War in the Middle East and North Africa.

The lecture will be held in English

Friday 7th June 2024, 12pm - 2pm

Salle Kant
Institut d'Études Européennes (IEE)
Avenue F. Roosevelt 39
1000 Bruxelles

La séance est prévue en présentiel

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