About this project

From the late Middle Ages, ‘the Levant’ was used to generically designate the Eastern coastal regions of the Mediterranean. Rather than exclusively referring to an Arab or Muslim world it evoked the idea of an interactional space, a ‘contact zone’ of commerce and trade between the cosmopolitan citizens of the Mediterranean. It is on this imaginary that subsequent Orientalist and colonialist discourses would draw.

This project examines how Levantine heritage is interpreted today by focusing on two major capital cities in the region. Damascus, often described as the city with ‘the longest history in the world’, represents a paradigmatic site of traditional
Arab-Levantine heritage; Amman, on the other hand, is popularly perceived as embodying a more recent tradition of Levantine modernity and is of crucial importance in the formation of a postcolonial national identity. These two cities thus symbolize two very different understandings of a ‘Levantine’ urban and national heritage.

Using a rich mix of methodological approaches, including ethnographic film, the project will investigate the varied
re-productions, their impacts on cultural tourism, and the ways in which such local re-imaginations of the past intersect with globalised understandings of local and regional political identities.