This paper considers the neglected history of Arwa Salih, a leader in the underground Egyptian Communist Workers Party in the 1970s. Women’s role in leading student strikes and underground communist activism has been marginalized in the accounts of the movement, but Salih’s case is marked by deliberate silence. Salih’s intimate history of the movement in her memoir al-Mubtasirun: Dafatir Wahida min Jil al-Haraka al-Tullabiyya (1996; The Stillborn: Notebooks of a Woman from the Student-Movement Generation, trans. Samah Selim, 2018) underlines the historical factors contributing to the depoliticization of the private sphere in Marxist organizations. Although not a feminist, Salih questions the quest for national liberation alongside reinforcement of gendered, traditional family values. Drawing on oral history interviews in an environment shaped by suspicion, with narrators close to Salih until her suicide in 1997, I seek to fill gaps in this historiography and explain the reasons Egyptian Marxists struggled to reconcile the fight for liberation, for which they have paid immense sacrifices, with gender equality.

This article examines how two recent artworks by Jewish Israeli artists—Paleosol 80 South by Amir Yatziv and Jonathan Doweck (2013), and Ella Littwitz’s Qasr al-Yahud project (2021)—critically engage with the legacy of biblical orientalism and its connection to ongoing colonial and ecological violence in Palestine/Israel. Focusing on biblical sites located in militarized border areas, both artworks self-reflectively invoke the orientalist tropes of wilderness and frontier, alongside typical genres of Western Holy Land literature. Simultaneously, they confront the present-day destruction of these sites through state violence, which turns the orientalist cliché into a reality. The article analyzes the contrasting registers of signification applied to the landscape—scriptural, military, and ecological—and explores how the artworks dramatize the tension between them. In doing so, they expose the mechanisms of power that shape the landscape and trace the marginalized histories that endure in their shadow.

This ethnography explores the temporalizing practices of workers at the Litani River powerplant—a key site of national infrastructural development in Lebanon. Departing from dominant narratives of crisis or collapse, it argues that workers inhabit a distinct spatial and temporal mode described as tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, an ambivalent alliance of convenience with the Litani river, its infrastructure, and the state. Rather than viewing their experience through paradigms of progress or decline, workers cultivate a modular relation to time, and to the seemingly isolated powerplant, marked by endurance. Tarabuṭ maṣlaḥi, the article suggests, is a mode of exercising and reproducing power at the intersection of material structures and embodied experience. Like a Möbius strip, its fraught political relations and dynamics of social reproduction continuously weave the space they constitute. It illustrates power’s reach through time while also revealing workers’ subtle ways of challenging it, beyond binaries of submission or resistance.