Robin D.G. Kelley, Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA joined us to discuss the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, its implications, and what struggle and solidarity means in this context.
With Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh, Professor of Philosophy and Cultural Studies at Birzeit University, Visiting Scholar at the Center for Palestine Studies.
Moderated by Nadia Abu El-Haj, Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University/Barnard College, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.
Robin D.G. Kelley
His books include:
Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times (2012)
Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original (2009)
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (2002)
Race Rebels: Culture Politics and the Black Working Class (1994)
Yo' Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (1997)
Author and historian Robin D.G. Kelley is the Gary B. Nash Professor of American History at UCLA.
Formerly the William B. Ransford Professor of Cultural and Historical Studies at Columbia University, Kelley helped to shape programs at its Institute for Research in African-American Studies. His essays have appeared in several anthologies and publications, including The Nation, Monthly Review, The Journal of Palestine Studies, Souls, Mondoweiss, Electronic Intifada, New York Times, Counterpunch, Black Music Research Journal, Callaloo, New Politics, Black Renaissance, Social Text, Boston Review, American Historical Review, Journal of American History, New Labor Forum, to name a few. He is a member of the Advisory Board for the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel.
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh is a poet and academic born in Jerusalem to a Palestinian refugee family from Ramlieh. He is an Associate Professor of philosophy, and cultural and Arab studies at Birzeit University. AlShaikh's work is focused on cultural representations and the politics of Palestinian identity, in addition to his works on Arab poetry, art criticism, and translation. He is a Fulbright visiting scholar at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University working on his project The Palestinian Living Cemetery.
Given the theoretical paradigm shift from bio-power to necro-politics throughout the last decade, his research aspires to instigate scholarly interest in the highly subversive spatio-temporal epitaphs of the Palestinian cemetery.
Al-Shaikh earned his Ph.D. in Middle East and Arab Studies at the University of Utah, after which he conducted his postdoctoral research in cultural mobility in near-eastern cultures at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin. Since 2004, he has been a fellow at both Muwatin-The Palestinian Institute for the Study of Democracy and the Institute of Palestine Studies. He is the author of: Sharon's Golden Heart: A Mythical Trial (2007), Palestinian Textbooks: Issues of Identity and Citizenship (2008) and The Biography of Gabi Baramki and His Odyssey at Birzeit University 1929-2012 (2015). He has published three collections of poetry: Ash Wheels (1998), City Remnants (2003), and Departing Narratives (2012). His forthcoming book is titled: The Columbus Syndrome and the Veiling of Palestine: A Genealogy of the Israeli Politics of Toponymy of the Palestinian Landscape 1856-2015 (by the Institute of Palestine Studies, 2015).
Nadia Abu El-Haj
Nadia Abu El-Haj is professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.
She is the author of Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (2012), both published by the University of Chicago Press.
Sponsored by
The Center for Palestine Studies
The Institute for Research on African-American Studies.
This event is free and open to the public.