UC Irvine

"Whiteness Across Waters" unearths the transcontinental cross-border journeys of republican virtues from the Ottoman Empire to diasporic outposts in the United States and back again to the empire in the age of global migrations. Although race as an analytic concept is rarely used to understand the dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in the Ottoman Empire and the Middle East, my dissertation argues that nineteenth-century migration experiences created deeply gendered and racialized notions of political inclusion and self-understanding among diasporic Ottoman communities. Applying a transnational approach and taking an interethnic minoritarian perspective, my project demonstrates how the politics of racialization of Arab and Armenian diasporic communities in the United States reconfigured perceptions of sex, masculinity, and nationhood in exile. My work problematizes state-centered narratives and privileges the voices of non-state migrant actors by extensively relying on Arabic-and-Armenian-language newspapers and documents from the Armenian Revolutionary Federation archives to unravel this overlooked history. The voices of Arab and Armenian diasporic exclaves are often muted in mainstream Ottoman histories and that of American immigration narratives. My dissertation aims to bring to light the forgotten critical role of these minoritized actors who connected otherwise two distant geographies because of their migration abroad. Whiteness Across Waters also joins in the scholarly endeavor to overturn denialist race-innocent narratives of the Ottoman Empire in general and the Middle East in particular which have been bound to paradigms of “modernization and westernization” that celebrate whiteness and its legacies.