UC Berkeley

This dissertation argues that a particular kind of experience of memory, what I call an appeal to a non-secular justice, became available at a bakery in Tripoli, Lebanon by means of the work of bread. This bakery was a site where Syrian, but also Lebanese and Palestinian, migrant and refugee workers labored under conditions of modern capitalism amidst neoliberal collapse. Such experience, I argue, had its condition of possibility in the foreclosure of other kinds of politics due to violence, including the nation-state and revolutionary horizons. But it also had its condition of possibility in the iterative, embodied practices of bread-making, or what I call ‘the work of bread.’ Crucial to this approach is bread’s associations with ‘life’, ‘rights,’ and ‘justice’ in the Arab world. Amidst cycles of what bakery workers call the “life and death of dough”—the temporalizing force of the work of bread—another experience of memory became possible, one that gestured to a justice other than that of secular politics. The bakery thus became a site of the activation of an Islamicate archive of theology, philosophy, and poetics—a space of religious and aesthetic experience and experimentation giving form to life.

My dissertation takes a two-fold approach, organized into six chapters. On the one hand, I argue that the specific political importance of subsidized bread as a modality of sovereign power mediating between the state and its citizens is a modern, post-colonial phenomenon in the Levant —part of the twentieth century formation of the nation-state and its discourse of political rights in the region. I argue that this relationship is actively being reworked amidst the post-2011 popular uprisings, neoliberal austerity measures, and global food shortages due to war and climate change. On the other hand, I argue that the bakery is a space of memory and, for its Syrian workers, of mourning. Such an approach is made possible by the symbolic polyvalence of dough and bread—a figural plasticity that transforms the bakery into the site of a dreamwork, often spoken of amongst the bakery workers in terms of the ethical-spiritual heart [al-qalb] and the imagination [al-khayal]. This vision reveals the bakery as a scene of struggle by which the practices organized around bread’s production—stories, pedagogical lessons, jokes—give shape to efforts to reconstruct a sociality born from a life in flight.