There is no precise English equivalent to this Hindustani proverb. A rolling stone gathers no moss, between the devil and the deep blue sea, between a rock and a hard place, torn between two masters—none of these really fit. The dhobi ka kuta is the dog who figuratively and literally runs every day between two places, two obligations, and two choices. Does he stay behind to guard the master's house or does he guard his master as he washes clothes by the river? There will be a trade-off either way. The phrase does not conjure up vagabond restlessness or nomadic liberation. It evokes the anxiety of rootlessness, and the lack of certainty about choice and loyalty. It is about the doubt cast your way for not picking one thing over the other. It is about being stuck in the vagaries of the in-between.

The camp and the city are both important for understanding the relationship between space and identity in the refugee experience of exile. In the Palestinian example, the camp has emerged as a potent symbol in the narrative of exile although only a third of refugees registered with UNRWA live in camps. Moreover, the city and urban refugees remain missing in most of the scholarship on the Palestinian experience with space, exile, and identity. Furthermore, there is little attention to how refugees understand the concept of the city and camp in their daily life. This article examines how Palestinian urban refugees in the Old City of Damascus conceptualized the relationship between the camp and the city. It illustrates how the concept of the camp remained necessary for the construction of their collective national identity while in Syria. However, the city was essential in the articulation of individual desires and establishing social distinction from other refugees. Thus, during a protracted exile it is in the interstice between the city and the camp, where most urban refugees in the Old City situated themselves, that informed their national belonging and personal aspirations.

The present article is a study of provincial administration in the nineteenth-century Ottoman Albania and Kurdistan. It examines the transformation of provincial administration in Dibra and Hazro after two towns’ hereditary rulers were exiled. Focusing on the employment patterns of the notables in exile as well as the ones who occupied the posts in the absence of the former, this study challenges the binary framework mostly employed in conceptualizing the making of the modern Ottoman state. Particularly, the employment of the notables exiled to the distant parts of the empire necessitates a revision in the presumptions about the origins of appointed Ottoman officials. By focusing on the partnership operating by means of employment, this study argues that the making of Ottoman state follows a trajectory of flexible centralization based on the partnership between the government and notables, terms of which were constantly negotiated.

The publication in 1908 of The making of Ireland and its undoing, 1200–1600 by the London-based Irish historian, Alice Stopford Green, provoked a controversy that reveals much about the deepening political tensions at the heart of historical practice in the decade before 1916. Stopford Green took a deliberately controversial approach to the rewriting of medieval Ireland that triggered a bombardment of both positive and negative reactions. Supporters of Irish home rule applauded the work for its innovative analysis and contemporary relevance. But the book elicited a flurry of exasperation from a united front of ‘history men’, who dismissed Stopford Green and her work as ‘political’ and largely fictitious. Anticipating the reaction from a profession that was predominantly sympathetic to a unionist interpretation, Stopford Green had a well-prepared plan that harnessed both her gender and her transnational networks of influence to maximise the dissemination of her radical reimagining of the late medieval Gaelic world. By understanding these deeper strategies of defiance, Alice Stopford Green's history might be reclaimed as a key intervention in the structuring of both Ireland's national tradition and collective consciousness in preparation for independence.

The Fascist model of exhibiting power and placing it in museum settings had its origins in the Liberal exhibitions of the late nineteenth century, and in the first exhibitions devoted to the Risorgimento. However, the regime's museum initiatives were numerous, innovative and varied, and many of them have not yet been adequately investigated; those launched in Italy's colonies, in particular, remain largely unexplored. This article highlights the surprisingly extensive network of museums and temporary exhibitions that Fascism initiated in Italian possessions abroad, involving prominent figures from the regime and contemporary culture, and shows how science, culture and nation-building (in both the colonies and the mother country, and between them) were interwoven in the Fascist museological project for the colonies.

A vast array of narratives found in medieval historical chronicles and literary sources have referenced the particular ways in which the culture associated with the ‘Abbasid caliphate diverged from a binary model of gender. Despite debate about the historical accuracy of these early chronicles, the repeated references to the sixth ‘Abbasid caliph Muhammad al-Amin's non-heteronormativity indicate at least a kernel of truth. This article examines the collective memory construction of al-Amin in the Egyptian series Harun al-Rashid (1997) and two Syrian series, Abna’ al-Rashid: al-Amin wa-l-Ma'mun (The Sons of al-Rashid: al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, 2006) and Harun al-Rashid (2018). These contemporary portrayals of the life of al-Amin simultaneously illustrate the process by which history is altered by authorial perspective and the erasure of nonheteronormative space within the ‘Abbasid caliphate. My own authorial perspective inclines toward an interpretation of al-Amin as queer; through this lens, an inspection of wide-ranging accounts of al-Amin's life reveals the historical biases of his time and our current moment, too, as historians then and now variably recognize al-Amin's queerness in constructing collective memory. Some have argued that anti–al-Amin chroniclers may have engaged in historical revisionism and referred to al-Amin as queer to discredit the caliph, but ultimately, whether or not this is true, the current application of those early references by contemporary screenwriters is the most revealing historiographical decision, as his many representations serve as a mirror for our contemporary subjectivities, interests, and agendas. At a time when queer lives and experiences are notably absent from traditional historical narratives, this article proposes that regardless of the accuracy of the original sources, the absence itself in contemporary portrayals is significant, as patterns of exclusion yield tangible meaning. In this particular case, the ready elimination of queerness from contemporary narratives shows the ways in which queerness is vulnerable to erasure in favor of other, more politically expedient identity characteristics and values.