Introduction: Subalterns and the Middle East: Challenges, Histories, Historiagraphies

About fifteen years ago, the eruption of the first wave of the Arab Uprisings reignited scholarly interest in the history of subaltern groups in the MENA/ SWANA region.To drive this rediscovery was first and foremost the urgency to make sense of the present as, against decades of scholarly neglect, the revolts spectacularly disclosed the salience of Arab masses as key agents of change.The rediscovery of the propulsive power of the below also underscored the limits of the elite-centered and (neo)orientalist approaches that had historically informed Western scholarship on the region for, by denying subalterns recognition as meaningful historical agents, the latter revealed blatantly inadequate to both detect the transformations that were crossing Arab societies and provide scholars with an adequate body of knowledge to understand the genealogies and the characteristics of the constituencies who embodied them.The very composition of the constituencies who took the streets talked about the transformative agency of new social forces (es: urban poor, slum dwellers, impoverished middle classes, unemployed graduates, informal workers) exceeding the class (waged workers, peasants, students) and organizational structures (labor unions, guilds, political parties, formal associations) that, until that