The Middle East Underground: Revolutions, Resistance, and the Global South

This course reinterprets Middle Eastern political history through radical movements and global resistance. Rather than focusing on states and empires, it centers workers, students, women, queer activists, and intellectuals who imagined liberation across borders from the late Ottoman period to the present. Grounded in Marxism, feminism, anti-colonialism, and Third Worldism, the course explores how Middle Eastern struggles were shaped by and contributed to global movements in places from Havana, Tokyo, Accra, Moscow, and Oakland to Istanbul, Algiers, Beirut, Cairo, and Tehran. Through manifestos, memoirs, films, podcasts, and scholarly texts, we examine anti-colonial insurgencies, leftist movements, feminist organizations, postcolonial state-building, and contemporary activism. By placing the Middle East within the broader history of the Global South, the course presents political history as a story of social struggles that crossed geographic and cultural boundaries. Students will reflect on solidarity, revolution, exile, and resistance, and consider how past movements resonate with struggles today.