ATTEND | Inscriptions Unbound: Edward Said’s Library

This exhibit features inscriptions from approximately 50 books selected from Edward Said’s book collections, which are housed in the Edward Said Reading Room (Butler Library), the Middle East Institute, and his former New York City apartment. The exhibit provides a sampling of the numerous inscriptions that friends, students, family members, and admirers left in the opening pages of the books that they gifted to Edward Said. These heartfelt messages reveal Said’s profound and far-reaching influence, weaving a narrative of deep and broad intellectual and personal connections across peoples, disciplines, genres, times, and geographies. The inscriptions bear testimony to Said’s intellectual brilliance, but also to the deep empathy, courage, and vision that defined his lifelong advocacy for justice, human rights, and intellectual freedom. 

Curated by Joy Al-Nemri (MESAAS alumna).

 

VENUE
Butler Library, Room/Area: 3rd Floor Exhibit Space
535 W. 114 St., New York, NY 10027

DATE
Thursday, February 13, 2025 - Thursday, May 15, 2025 (all day)

EVENT CONTACT
Kaoukab Chebaro,
Columbia University Libraries
kc3287@columbia.edu

READ | "The Question of Genocide" by Ali H. Musleh and Jonathan Beller

This written dialogue studies how the “question of genocide” has infiltrated media ecology and come to permeate every meaning, gesture, and relation. Confronting Israel's escalation, since October 2023, of its genocidal siege on Palestine, two writers (a Palestinian and a Jew) engage in an experiment of thinking together that is at once critical, theoretical, affective, and emergent, in an effort to configure and, indeed, live part of their solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian liberation and self‐determination. Necessarily, the roles of photography, semiotics, social media, computation, racism, weaponry, and other machines of war and capital are here rendered as part of the micrological murmurations of thought, sensibility, and communication, even as they macrologically reform geopolitical terrains both real and imagined. Thought, feeling, knowledge, epistemology, intellectual, and cultural practice are all understood to unfold in the theater of racial capitalist warfare that offers up genocide not as exception but as paradigm.

Citation
Jonathan Beller, Ali Musleh; The Question of Genocide. Social Text 1 December 2024; 42 (4 (161)): 81–102. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-11369803

Jonathan Beller is professor of humanities and media studies and cofounder of the Graduate Program in Media Studies at Pratt Institute. He is also Distinguished Visiting Professor of English and of Women's, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University; Visiting Professor at REMESO / Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society, Linköping University, Sweden; and Visiting Researcher, University of the Arts, Helsinki Research Institute, Finland.

Ali H. Musleh is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Postdoctoral Fellow at the Columbia University Center for Palestine Studies.