We drafted this Editors’ Note at the end of yet another brutal academic year of genocide, war, and repression, and anticipate that it will be published before the next academic year begins. During this season when the cycle of teaching and administrative labor slows down or pauses for many of us, we take stock of our shared state of exhaustion, depletion, and burnout.

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.

Amid compounding crises and infrastructure breakdown, trucking has become a fundamental mode of water distribution in Lebanon’s Bekaa valley. Water trucks address the momentary failings of the standard distribution network and also extend water’s reach to displaced communities prohibited from these connections. This paper offers an ethnography of water trucks servicing populations experiencing a “cut-off” (maʾtouʿ) life, from Lebanese municipalities experiencing infrastructure breakdown to displaced Syrians living in off-grid settlements. Rather than permanently repair broken systems, water trucks bring continuous relief to the (un)expected and inevitable shortcomings of infrastructure’s standard operations. They are vital, powerful, yet suspect actors that, by delivering a fundamental life necessity, shape daily life in contemporary Lebanon. Closely examining water trucks and the service they provide through their raucous, hazardous, and life-giving operations brings into relief material, labor, and political realities. Despite concerns regarding cost and quality, trucking has become essential to the adequate functioning of the everyday in Lebanon.

This article traces the rise of the Lamlums, a family belonging to the Fawayid tribe in Egypt, between the 1830s and 1930s. As tribal shaykhs, the Lamlums’ trajectories are part of a larger historical process in which a new bedouin elite took shape in modern Egypt. How did the family amass their wealth and status between the early 19th and mid-20th centuries? What does the family history reveal about bedouins’ paths to social mobility in modern Egypt? Using Egyptian and British archives, newspapers, and oral traditions, I argue that the turbulent process of settling bedouin tribes and streamlining their organization in 19th-century Egypt allowed bedouin shaykhs to accumulate land and power in their capacity as bureaucrats. By the interwar period, changing political and economic conditions allowed newer generations of landed shaykhs to dislodge themselves from the bureaucratic net their predecessors had participated in. Throughout a century of bureaucratic (dis)integration and land accumulation, these shaykhs transformed the meanings of tribal authority. The Lamlums tell a wider story about the dialectic pull between bureaucracy and land, the unforeseen consequences of the settlement policy, and the malleability of the category of tribe.

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 paper investigates intellectual engagement with bodily excreta in premodern Arabic literature, addressing disgust as a negotiation of sensory proximity. Drawing on Winfried Menninghaus’s concept of “unwanted nearness,” I argue that both Arabic and Western traditions employ similar distancing tactics to manage the unbearable presence of the effluent self. By utilizing humor, fiction, othering, or relegation to an ancient past and faraway lands, these observers maintain a safe buffer from the unsettling reality of waste. By tracing a sensory progression from the distant perceptions of sight and hearing toward the invasive breaking point of taste, this study reveals how premodern authors from the 3rd/9th and 4th/10th centuries navigated the paradox of self-disgust. Even when the genre of sukhf (folly) appears to collapse these boundaries, its practitioners relied on a literary tongue to intellectually embrace the repulsive while physically recoiling from its literal touch.

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.