Black September: Sovereignty, Dispossession, and the Politics of National Memory

This thesis provides a critical re-examination of Black September, an armed conflict between the Hashemite regime of Jordan and the Palestinian Resistance Movement's guerilla fighters, the fedayin, which took place primarily in September 1970. Most studies of this war have understood its importance either through a military Cold War lens or as a turning point within the organization of the resistance movement, forcing the fedayin to relocate to Beirut. Both of these approaches have failed to recognize the conflict's importance within the process of Jordanian nation state building. Addressing this gap in the literature, my intervention argues that Black September served as a constructive moment for the deepening of Hashemite authority-not just militarily, but discursively and epistemologically. Using original archival research within diplomatic records and popular Arabic press, I demonstrate through the case study of the widely- ignored United Arab Kingdom Plan the ways in which Black September led to new, negotiated articulations of Arab Nationalism, Hashemite exceptionalism, and paternalistic control of imaginaries of Palestine. Furthermore, by proposing a centering of refugee camps-the material, local space of the conflict-I demonstrate the need for critically interrogating the archive built around Black September, arguing that its obscurity has worked to reinforce Hashemite hegemony. Today, as the Hashemite Kingdom continues integrating a new wave of Syrian refugees into its national fabric, interrogating the connections between national identity, state violence, refugee integration, and political resistance is as critical as ever.