Join us for a workshop concert of Late Style or A Double Fugue, a staged adaptation of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Vintage Press, 2002), on Saturday, April 29th at 7pm.

Location
Teatro of the Italian Academy
1161 Amsterdam Avenue
New York, NY 10027

Late Style or A Double Fugue: Beethoven and the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra
Late Style invites us into the extraordinary friendship between a Palestinian-American scholar and an Israeli conductor and the global orchestra they imagined into being. Edward Said and Daniel Barenboim created the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra to bring together Arab and Israeli musicians. It became an unsettling, humbling, and joyful experiment in understanding the “other.” This performance piece is an adaptation of Parallels and Paradoxes: Explorations in Music and Society (Vintage Press, 2002), a book of conversations between Said and Barenboim on aesthetics and politics. When staged, Late Style is half text and half music—mostly by Beethoven, and the highly-acclaimed Syrian composer Kinan Azmeh.

Late Style follows the form of Beethoven’s late String Quartet in B-flat Major, Op.130 (1825). It has six movements ending with a performance of the Grosse Fuge. Beethoven’s late work is known for its radicality, as “music for a later age.”

Late Style is timely: it speaks about music and late Beethoven, Israel and Palestine, immigration, belonging, the rise of totalitarianism, and the necessity of the arts to find political solutions. Late Style—with all of its music—is beautiful and expresses radical hope in a world that cannot afford to lose it.

The music is performed live by a quartet from the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra.

Late Style Performers and Team
Omar Metwally: Edward Said
Andrew Polk: Daniel Barenboim
Michael Laurence: Understudy

The Divan Quartet
Bassam Nashawati: Violin
Nurit Pacht: Violin
Sindy Mohamed: Viola
Lia Chen Perlov: Cello
Amer Hasan: Clarinet

Kinan Azmeh: Composer
Rony Rogoff: Music Director
Tanya Jayani Fernando: Writer and Director
Ken Cerniglia: Dramaturg
Susan Jahoda: Video Artist
Saba Husain: Directorial Assistant

This performance of Late Style is the culmination of a week-long workshop, organized and sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. The program is partially supported by grants from the Opportunity Fund, the Illinois Arts Council Agency, the Puffin Foundation and the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA). The performance is cosponsored by Columbia University’s Italian Academy, the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Department of English, and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society. It is part of The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture Series, organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

Join us for a screening of four documentary short films that explore geography using a range of techniques, including cartographic mapping, 3D reconstruction, soundscape recordings, digital spatial imaginaries, that all reverberate through the poetics of Palestinian landscape. This event is organized by the Center for Palestine Studies and co-sponsored by Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology.

The screenings will be followed by a response by Alessandra Amin, the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies.

FILMS
Your Father Was Born 100 Years Old & So Was the Nakba
Dir. Razan AlSalah, 2017, 7 mins.
Oum Ameen, a Palestinian grandmother, returns to her hometown Haifa through Google Maps Streetview, today, the only way she can see Palestine. 

Ambience
Dir. Wisam Al Jafari, 2019, 15 mins. 
Two young Palestinians try to record a demo for a music competition inside a noisy crowded refugee camp. While failing recording because of the chaos of the place, they discover an authentic way to allow them to meet the deadline creatively.

Un-Forming Zionism
Dir. Khalid Al-Bashir, 2021, 16 mins. 
Unforming Zionism is a multimedia visual essay centered on an investigation into the Haifa Governmental Hospital in Palestine, built-in 1938. Through counter-cartographic decoding of the material, economic and political networks complicit in the construction of the hospital, the video-essay offers a lens through which we can observe and understand colonial Zionist and British collusions that led to the dispossession of Palestinians.

Our songs were ready for all the wars to come
Dir. Noor Abed, 2021, 21 mins. 
Our Songs were Ready for all the Wars to Come explores the critical stance of ‘folklore’ as a source of knowledge, and its possible connection to alternative social and representational models in Palestine. How can ‘folklore’ become a common emancipatory tool for people to overturn dominant discourses, reclaim their history and land, and rewrite reality as they know it? Captured through mediums of film and sound, situated stories are archived and represented, creating a context that explores the capacity of social formation, and the possibility of recalling a memory that is capable of decentralizing images of fixity; a memory that is liberated from monuments. 

FILMMAKER BIOS
Based in Tio'tia:ke/Montreal, Razan AlSalah is a Palestinian artist and teacher investigating the material aesthetics of dis/appearance of places and people in colonial image worlds. Her work has shown at community-based and international film festivals & galleries including Art of the Real, Prismatic Ground, RIDM, HotDocs, Yebisu, Melbourne, Glasgow and Beirut International, Sharjah Film Forum, IZK Institute for Contemporary Art and Sursock Museum. AlSalah co-directs the Feminist Media Studio with Krista Lynes and teaches film and media arts at the Communication Studies department at Concordia University.

Noor Abed (b. 1988, Palestine) works at the intersection of performance, media and film. Through a process of image making, her works create situations where social possibilities are both rehearsed and performed. Abed’s work has been screened and exhibited internationally at Anthology Film Archives, New York, Gabes Cinema Fen Film Festival, Tunisia, Ji.hlava International Documentary Film Festival, The New Wight Biennial, Los Angeles, Leonard & Bina Gallery, Montréal, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, Ujazdowski Centre for Contemporary Art, Warsaw, The Mosaic Rooms, London, and MAXXI - National Museum of 21st Century Art, Rome. In 2020, she co-founded, with Lara Khaldi, the School of Intrusions, an independent educational platform in Ramallah, Palestine. Abed is currently a resident at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam 2022-24 and was recently awarded the Han Nefkens Foundation/Fundació Antoni Tàpies Video Art Production Grant 2022.

Wisam Al Jafari is a filmmaker born in Dheisheh Refugee Camp near Bethlehem. He obtained his BFA in filmmaking from Dar Alkalima University ,and has worked in many films as an Assistant Director, Location Manager, Camera Assistant and Sound Engineer. Wisam also made few short fictions and experimental films.

Khaled Al-Bashir is an architect and researcher who employs multimedia methods to explore the intersections between design, space, and politics. He is interested in using architecture and its tools to decipher social and political realities. He has taught at Falmouth University and the Architectural Association Summer School, and his work has been exhibited at Darat Al-Funun and The Palestine Museum.

SPEAKER
Alessandra Amin is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow in Palestine Studies at Columbia’s Center for Palestine Studies. She holds a PhD in Art History from UCLA. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Darat al-Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the U.S. Department of Education. She is is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982, which looks to an era of history bookended by the launch of the Palestinian Revolution and the demolition of its epicenter in Beirut. Read more.

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators
Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

The Last Mamluk Library
After some devastating decades, in the early nineteenth century Jaffa witnessed a flourish period. Abu Nabbut, the deputy governor of the Mediterranean town, fostered Jaffa’s fortification and attracted traders by investing in the economic infrastructure. Following his former master, Acre’s strongman Ahmad Pasha al-Jazzar, he established a large-scale endowment complex to finance his endeavour. As a central part of this complex, Abu Nabbut built the Great Mosque (also known as Mahmudi Mosque) which included a madrasa and a book collection. In this lecture, we will zoom in on the Great Mosque’s library. Based on a combination of different source material, we will trace its foundation, see what its former books have to say about their own history, and follow their trajectories until today. This, in turn, will reveal a largely unknown part of the history of books and libraries in Ottoman Palestine. 

Benedikt Reier studied Middle Eastern History in Hamburg, Birzeit, and Berlin. He holds a PhD from Freie Universität Berlin/Berlin Graduate School Muslim Culture and Societies with a dissertation on biographical dictionaries in the Mamluk era. His research interests include historiography, history of archiving, book and library history, crusades, and the cultural and social history of bilad al-sham. He has published on the reception of jihad literature in the crusading period (Crusades) and on a 17th century Aleppine private library (Der Islam). He is currently working in Hamburg at the Centre for the Studies of Manuscript Cultures on the early-Ottoman sijillat of Jerusalem. 

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. Writing and reading, considered as cultural and historical phenomena, have figured centrally in Brinkley Messick’s research on Islamic societies in both Arabia and North Africa. This work considers the production and circulation, inscription and subsequent interpretation of Arabic texts such as regional histories, law books, and court records. Messick has sought to understand the relation of writing and authority, events such as the advent of print technology, hybrid contemporary practices of reading, and local histories of record keeping and archiving. Much of this work dovetails with Messick's general interests in legal anthropology and legal history, and with his specific interests in Islamic law. 

What can Palestine teach us about the global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession? What is the relationship between land and colonialism? Moving beyond paradigms of exceptionalism and the confines of the nation-state reveals Palestine as a key site to explore these questions. Tracing the struggle on and over land, this talk reflects on Palestine’s lessons in and with the movement for global racial justice.

SPEAKERS
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores economy, territory, the home, and the body. Her forthcoming book, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine tells a global history of capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is co-editor of Journal of Palestine Studies and Jadaliyya.

Introduction by Nadia Abu El-Haj, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.

This event is organized with the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life and cosponsored by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities.

This presentation focuses on a new book project entitled, Imprisoned: Voices and Images from Confinement Landscapes in Palestine.  A work in progress, Imprisoned is a detailed investigation into a vanishing Palestinian landscape that is disappearing under the onslaught of an expanding landscape of colonization and settlement imposed on the land by the State of Israel.  As the Palestinian landscape disappears under the footprint of Israeli colonization and settlement, the geographical spaces remaining for Palestinians in which to reside, work, and circulate contract leaving behind what the book argues are “confinement landscapes.” Enlisting a thickly descriptive ethnography, alongside photographic images taken by the author, this presentation reveals the lived experience of three individuals confronted by confinement in three different Palestinian locales, framed by broader theoretical issues of settler colonialism and the interplay of landscapes and power.

SPEAKERS

Gary Fields is a Professor in the Department of Communication and an affiliate in the Department of History at the University of California, San Diego.  Formally trained in historical geography, he is the author of Enclosure:  Palestinian Landscapes in a Historical Mirror (2017, University of California Press), and “Lockdown:  Gaza Through a Camera Lens and Historical Mirror” (2020, Journal of Palestine Studies). 

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies.

ABOUT HOSTILE HOMELANDS
Under Narendra Modi, India has changed dramatically. As the world attempts to grapple with its trajectory towards authoritarianism and a 'Hindu Rashtra' (Hindu State), little attention has been paid to the linkages between Modi's India and the governments from which it has drawn inspiration, as well as military and technical support.

India once called Zionism racism, but, as Azad Essa argues, the state of Israel has increasingly become a cornerstone of India's foreign policy. Looking to replicate the 'ethnic state' in the image of Israel in policy and practice, the annexation of Kashmir increasingly resembles Israel's settler-colonial project of the occupied West Bank. The ideological and political linkages between the two states are alarming; their brands of ethnonationalism deeply intertwined.

Hostile Homelands puts India's relationship with Israel in its historical context, looking at the origins of Zionism and Hindutva; India's changing position on Palestine; and the countries' growing military-industrial relationship from the 1990s. Lucid and persuasive, Essa demonstrates that the India-Israel alliance spells significant consequences for democracy, the rule of law and justice worldwide.

SPEAKERS
Azad Essa is an award-winning journalist and author based between Johannesburg and New York City. He is currently a senior reporter for Middle East Eye covering American foreign policy, Islamophobia and race in the US. He is the author of The Moslems are Coming and Zuma's Bastard and has written for Al Jazeera, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy and the Guardian.

Manan Ahmed is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. His areas of specialization include intellectual history in South and Southeast Asia; critical philosophy of history, colonial and anti-colonial thought. He is interested in how modern and pre-modern historical narratives create understandings of places, communities, and intellectual genealogies for their readers.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for an online conversation with Raja Shehadeh and Rashid Khalidi about Shehadeh’s new memoir, We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I.

Aziz Shehadeh was many things: lawyer, activist, and political detainee, he was also the father of bestselling author and activist Raja. In this new and searingly personal memoir, Raja Shehadeh unpicks the snags and complexities of their relationship.

A vocal and fearless opponent, Aziz resists under the British mandatory period, then under Jordan, and, finally, under Israel. As a young man, Raja fails to recognize his father’s courage and, in turn, his father does not appreciate Raja’s own efforts in campaigning for Palestinian human rights. When Aziz is murdered in 1985, it changes Raja irrevocably.

This is not only the story of the battle against the various oppressors of the Palestinians, but a moving portrait of a particular father and son relationship.

Raja Shehadeh is a Palestinian lawyer and writer who lives in the Ramallah refugee camp. He is a founder of the pioneering, nonpartisan human rights organization Al-Haq, an affiliate of the International Commission of Jurists, and the author of several books about international law, human rights, and the Middle East.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University.

We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I (Penguin Random House, 2023) is available for purchase here.

While traveling around the world to present his previous film, Off Frame, an all-archival exhumation of Palestinian revolutionary cinema, Yaqubi met someone who claimed to have a voluminous collection of pro-Palestinian work ... in Japan. Using that footage, R 21 aka Restoring Solidarity offers a fascinating, eclectic, and inspiring survey of cross-continental solidarity. Some are imported, dubbed, and re-edited films from Palestine, others are Japanese-made documents, replete with location interviews with PLO leaders and frontline reporting, made for leftists agitating for upheaval in their own country. Yaqubi maintains every layer of overdubbing and subtitling, letting the transferals, transmutations, and identifications leave marks on the record, like fossil impressions on the celluloid. Sporadically, a contemporary voice weighs in on the soundtrack—a call for, and a reclamation of, collective resistance.

Mohanad Yaqubi is a Palestinian filmmaker, producer, and one of the founders of the Ramallah-based production house Idioms Film. Yaqubi also is one of the founders of the research and curatorial collective Subversive Films, which focuses on militant film practices, and a founding member of the Palestine Film Institute. His film No Exit (2015, written with Omar Kheiry) premiered at the Dubai International Film Festival. His feature Off Frame aka Revolution Until Victory (2016), screened at TIFF, Berlinale, cinema du reel, Dubai IFF, and other festivals worldwide. Since 2017, he has been a resident researcher at the School of the Art (KASK) in Gent, Belgium. 

Palestine Cuts 2022-23 Curators

Nadine Fattaleh is a Palestinian writer and researcher from Amman, Jordan. She previously worked on projects at the Center for Spatial Research, Studio-X Amman, and MMAG Foundation. In 2021-2, she was the OSUN Fellow in Human Rights and the Arts at Bard College. She is currently a PhD student in Media, Culture and Communications at New York University. Nadine is a member of the Palestinian Social Fund as well as the editorial collective of Science for the People Magazine.

Nasreen Abd Elal is a multidisciplinary graphic designer, illustrator, and researcher whose work centers on the intersection of graphic design and justice-oriented movement work. She works as an information designer at Visualizing Palestine. She graduated with a degree in Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies from Columbia University in 2020.

Palestine Cuts is generously supported by Jeanne and Ken Levy-Church.

As we mark the twentieth anniversary of Edward W. Said's death, join us for an evening panel celebrating Edward W. Said and pianist and conductor Daniel Barenboim’s collaboration, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, and the many projects that have developed since this journey began. Co-founded by Professor Said and Daniel Barenboim, the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra promotes coexistence and intercultural dialogue by bringing young Israelis, Palestinians, and Arabs together to make music. 

The panel will feature Mariam C. Said, Vice President of the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA); Michael Barenboim, Dean of the Barenboim-Said Akademie; and musicians Miriam Manasherov and Samir Obaido; and will be moderated by Professor Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Modern Arab Studies.

This event is part of The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture Series, organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and co-sponsored by the Department of English and Comparative Literature, the Center for Palestine Studies and the Barenboim-Said Foundation (USA).