2025 Theses Doctoral

One Thousand and One Nightmares: Colonial Conspiracies and Their Afterlives in Modern Middle Eastern Media

Labanieh, Aya

This dissertation examines the literary and media trope of the “conspiracy” through a postcolonial lens, and traces how real conspiracies (spy rings, secret plots, psyops) by colonial powers in the Middle East were reworked into conspiracy theories and heterodox memory cultures in the twentieth century. “One Thousand and One Nightmares” reads a multi-genre canon of Arabophone and Anglophone literature in conversation with newspaper archives, films, television series, visual artworks, and Internet discourse, to show how the trope of “conspiracy” crystallizes as a pervasive mode of political analysis, literary imagination, and knowledge-production within and about the modern Middle East.

I show how suspicions of “conspiracies” (real and imagined) attach themselves to certain ambiguous, hybrid, or minoritized figures in society, often in dialogue with clandestine and “epistemically damaging” colonial projects unfolding in the region, which destroy public trust in state institutions and political processes.

In Chapter 1, I focus on the British colonial character of the “scholar-spy” galavanting through Egypt and Iraq during the revolutionary period of the Global 1919, seeking to produce knowledge about the Orient as well as intelligence to quash native anti-colonial rebellion.

In Chapter 2, I examine the development of anti-semtic and anti-Arab conspiracy theories in the public spheres of Egypt and Israel after the false-flag terrorist operation of 1956 (“Operation Susannah”).

In Chapter 3, I zero in on the conspiratorial figure of the “collaborator” in the context of the Cold War and Palestinian resistance movements, and how this figure’s relationship to CIA psyops and the Israeli military render him the “dark twin” of the resistance fighter. I argue that conspiracy’s double meaning, as both a political event in history and a paranoid story about oppression, transforms the trope into an imperfect tool for theorizing global power from above and from below. As such, conspiracy becomes a double-edged sword of critical analysis and noxious disinformation, subaltern solidarity and colonial collusion.