Chloe Bordewich (PhD Harvard 2022) is an historian focused on empire, media, and language politics in the modern Middle East. From 2023-24, she was the JHI-CDHI Digital Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow. Her current book project explores the fight for freer access to information in colonial and postcolonial Egypt. Her fellowship research project is titled Paradise Expressway, a bilingual (Arabic/English) play that explores the everyday impact of surveillance amid the destruction of Cairo’s historic tombs. Chloe is our 2024-25 New Media Public Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow.
What are your main research interests and what excites you most about them?
I am a historian of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century Middle East, and my research is based primarily in Egypt and Turkey. I study the history of information---news, rumors, leaks, and propaganda. I am especially interested in how secrets warp political relationships and shape the production of historical narratives. I ask questions like What do people think they have a right to know? What do states choose to conceal? How do we find our way around silences?
The Boston Little Syria Project, a public history initiative I helped found in 2022, is also thriving. It traces the history of the city’s first Arabic-speaking community from the 1890s through the 1950s. What excites me about BLS is the enthusiastic engagement of the community: we are constantly receiving new leads, often photographs that have been in someone’s attic for decades. It is much less of a solo enterprise than what we are accustomed to as historians.
What project are you working on at the JHI and why did you choose it?
I’m writing a play titled Paradise Expressway. This is a new genre for me, and I am grateful that JHI has been open to experiments. The play is set in and around contemporary Cairo’s City of the Dead, a vast complex of medieval and modern tombs inhabited by more than 500,000 living people. Recently, the government has been demolishing tombs and displacing residents in the service of a massive infrastructure project. Mine is a work of fiction, exploring surveillance, distrust, and the consequences of our inattention amid the havoc of urban destruction wreaked in the name of progress. It is also, I was surprised to discover, a play about friendship. There will be a staged reading with student actors at the Helen Gardiner Phelan Playhouse on April 11.
Paradise Expressway is rooted in ideas that were gestating as I wrote my dissertation but didn’t quite fit within the frame of my historical research—namely because they related to what was happening in the present. Like many scholars, I am obsessed with other writers’ acknowledgments: they let us glimpse the personal marginalia of their work, what is happening off the printed page. I wrote a play in part to see if I could bring the two together. I have also been thinking about whether writing fiction, specifically drama, can help us write better history. Or does it possibly risk impeding it?
This is your second year at the JHI. How has your JHI Fellowship experience been so far? Are there any differences from last year?
Last year, I was new both to Toronto and to U of T. I knew almost no one. This year I was new to playwriting but, thanks to my previous JHI fellowship, I started with an established community of friends and colleagues. I couldn’t have managed to stage a reading of my play without the wisdom and support of this community. You cannot produce a play alone!
Participating in weekly discussions with two JHI cohorts with two annual themes has shown me that it’s possible to ask completely different sets of questions of the same sources. In searching for points of connection with other fellows, I’m noticing things about my own material I never dwelled on before.
Why do you believe the humanities are important?
Spending time with past lives is humbling—it forces us to acknowledge the limits of our ability to access the experiences, and especially the interior life, of others. Humans of the past often seem incredibly foreign, even one's own ancestors. I have recently discovered a love of literary translation, and with it a whole new way of reading. It gives me a feeling of intimacy with other writers’ words I hadn't experienced before. Even so, there are plenty of phrases that don’t make sense, words I have to turn over again and again before I'm sure of their meaning. I see the humanities as a way of reading society with a similar pairing of the desire for closeness and the humble possibility that we might not always understand.
Can you share something you read/watched/listened to recently that you enjoyed/were inspired by?
I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent miniseries Say Nothing, based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s engrossing book by the same title. It’s an intimate depiction of political violence in Belfast during the Troubles that doesn’t shy away from moral complexity, and I loved the show. But it also highlighted for me, as a historian venturing to write a play, the risky ethics of dramatization—especially when one’s characters are real people who are still alive. Say Nothing was made possible by the unexpected and premature subpoena of oral histories of IRA fighters who spoke openly with the understanding that their interviews would be locked up until everyone was dead. The show has an odd disclaimer at the end of every episode and is fighting an IRA member’s lawsuit.
What is a fun fact about you?
My own on-screen career has just one credit: I was an extra in the 2020 Belgian-Egyptian film Shams, playing a partygoer rocking out beside Egyptian mahraganat star DJ Sadat. I was looking forward to the scene where I danced with a giant chicken mask over my head, but the editor cut that part out.