A Talk by Nadia Abu El-Haj
Friday, 11 March 2022
5:30pm
2022 Annual Lecture at the Centre for Palestine Studies at SOAS: The Perils and Promises of History
About the talk
"All wars are fought twice, the first time on the battlefield, the second time in memory," writes Viet Thanh Nguyen. In post-1948 Palestine/Israel, the battle over memory –– and history –– of Israel’s originary war endures and has been for decades now a central focus of not only politics but also, of scholarship. Toward what ends? In this talk, I reconsider a certain faith in the promise of reading “against” or “along” the archival grain as a project of anti- and post-colonial scholarship. From the perspective of figurations of contemporary politics not just in Israeli society but also in the U.S., I query whether that intellectual-qua-political project –– and its faith in the reparatory possibilities of history (writing) –– might be increasingly unsustainable today.
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 at Columbia University.
The in-person event is free and open to the public. For more information, click here.