Lse Middle East Centre Podcasts

This keynote lecture took place at the Gramsci in the Middle East & North Africa Conference organised by the LSE Middle East Centre in cooperation with Ghent University from 9-10 May, 2022. The conference explored, through empirically-grounded research, how Gramsci’s work can help us make sense of our contemporary moment in the region marked by a significant expansion in resistance and uprising. Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. She was previously a post-doctoral fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation in Berlin where she was writing a book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. She is also a visiting scholar at Humboldt University’s Lautarchiv exploring the experiences of Egyptian, Tunisian and Algerian workers and subalterns on the fronts of World War I (and resulting re