ATTEND | CPS SOAS Annual Lecture 2022: The Perils and Promises of History

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.

ATTEND | Examining the Colonial Assemblage in Rural Palestine

A Talk by Wassim Ghantous

Tuesday, 22 Feb 2022
5:30-7:00pm NY

Over the last two decades, the Israeli regime of colonization and control in Palestine has multiplied significantly. In its expansion, public, hybrid, and civilian actors and institutions come to form an overall settler colonial assemblage. This talk aims to shed light on how such a diffuse regime of colonization operates today in rural areas of the West Bank by attending to Palestinians’ everyday encounters with the Israeli army, settler vigilante groups and organizations, and privatized security bodies and agents. In particular, the talk will highlight the modes of violence produced by the colonial assemblage, the ways in which they affect Palestinians’ everyday life, as well as Palestinians’ manoeuvring efforts to evade them as means to remain steadfast in their homeland.

Wassim Ghantous is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, New York. His academic research cuts across the fields of political geography and international relations, and the sub-fields of critical security studies, surveillance studies, settler colonial studies, and Palestine studies. Previous to his academic career, he worked in several Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations, most notably at the BADIL Resource Center and
B’Tselem.

This lecture is organized by the Middle Eastern Studies Program and Anthropology Program at Bard College and will be delivered virtually via Zoom. For more info, click here.

VISIT | Palestinian Voices: Library Resources at Barnard College Library

CPS is pleased to co-sponsor Palestinian Voices, a reading list organized and curated by the Barnard College Library.

The list invites readers to explore Palestinian perspectives on history, settler colonialism, dispossession, memory and future imaginaries. Included works take the form of novels. scholarship, zines, and more, and most are accessible in digital and print formats.

Among the authors are two of the Center’s core faculty, Nadia Abu El-Haj and Rashid Khalidi and Barnard College colleagues, Thea Abu El- Haj and Zaina Arafat.

Many of the authors have participated in CPS programming over the years, including Suad Amiry, Noura Erakat, and Raja Shehadah.

We celebrate the increased accessibility of many of these works through the efforts of the librarians at Barnard College Library.

ATTEND | Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future

On Thursday, February 10, at 12 pm, the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University will host a conversation with Gil Hochberg about her new book, Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future (Duke, 2021).

About the Book
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine’s future.

She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history’s repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive’s liberatory potential.

“Appearing at a time when interest in Palestinian imaginative culture is higher than it has ever been, Becoming Palestine is a highly original and illuminating study of recent Palestinian creative works unlike any that has been published thus far. It will attract scholars of Israel and Palestine, Palestinian culture, modern Arab and Middle Eastern art and cinema, and I expect it to be widely read by curators and practitioners throughout the world who work on art that engages with archives and politics.”— Nadia Yaqub, author of Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. 

About the Author
Gil Z. Hochberg is the Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University and author of Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, also published by Duke University Press, and In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.

ATTEND | The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism

The Cunning of Gender Violence: Geopolitics and Feminism

FRIDAY
25 Feb 2022
12-1:30pm EST

Join the Center for Middle East Studies at Brown University for a seminar with Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Over the course of two decades, violence against women (VAW) and subsequently, gender-based violence (GBV) have emerged as powerful agendas within international governance and law, increasingly folded into state sovereignty and global security. What was once a marginalized and silenced feminist concern around the urgency of addressing gender violence, now sits firmly at the nexus of powerful global networks of institutions and practices that have recast governmentality, development, humanitarianism, and even human rights, in line with post-9/11 global security regimes. How did this happen? What are the politics, ideologies, and geographies of this feminist agenda? What are the modes and channels of operation of the master category of GBVAW as both a technology and apparatus of rule? And most urgently for feminists, what effects is this convergence on GBVAW having on those who are the subjects of violence, experiencing it inscribed on their bodies, psyches, lives, and relationships, whether through silence or hypervisibility?

This seminar is based on the findings of a three-year collaborative research project between feminist scholars of the Middle East and South Asia that explored these questions across a range of intersecting local, national, and global contexts, in the process uncovering the ways in which religion and racialized ethnicity, particularly “the Muslim question,” run deeply through the international governance structures of GBVAW, even when insistently disavowed.

The three seminar speakers are co-editors and contributors of chapters to the forthcoming book (Duke University Press, 2022) that is the outcome of this collaboration.

Panelists

Lila Abu-Lughod is the Joseph L. Buttenwieser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University where she teaches in the Department of Anthropology and at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.

Rema Hammami is a founding member of the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University where she is an Associate Professor of Anthropology. She is the Spring 2022 Visiting Fellow in Palestinian Studies at Brown University.

Nadera Shalhoub Kevorkian is the Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Global Chair in Law- Queen Mary University of London

ATTEND | Palestine/Israel, Visual Culture, and the World to Come

Palestine/Israel, Visual Culture, And the World To Come: A Conversation Between Gil Hochberg and Shirly Bahar, Moderated by Helga Tawil Souri

Wednesday
16 February 2022
12:30 PM NY

This event celebrates the recent publications of Gil Hochberg’s Becoming Palestine: Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future, and Shirly Bahar’s Documentary Cinema in Israel/Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home. Join the authors and moderator Helga Tawil Souri for a conversation and a visual show and tell of some of the artwork explored in the books, followed by a Q & A. Hochberg’s study of contemporary Palestinian art, and Bahar’s study of Palestinian and Mizrahi documentaries from the early 2000s, demonstrate the crucial role that visual culture has been playing in the past 20 years in weaving potential futures beyond the current dominance of Zionism in Palestine/Israel. What intellectual, creative, and liberatory possibilities emerge from the study of visual culture about the past, ongoing, and present histories of Palestine/Israel? How do visual artwork queer temporalities to resist dominant narratives and conventional archiving towards a vision of Palestinian return? And what can we learn about solidarity with the struggle for Palestinian freedom from immersing ourselves in visual work by and about the people who embody the everyday making and becoming of Palestine?

This event is organized by the Hagop Kevorkian Center at NYU and co-sponsored by the Center for Media, Culture, and History at NYU. It is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Panelists

Gil Z. Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Visual Studies, Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University and author of Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, also published by Duke University Press (2015), and In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination, published by Princeton University press (2007).

Shirly Bahar teaches at Columbia University’s School of Visual Arts. Shirly’s writing and curatorial work explores the relationships between representation, politics, and the body. Shirly has published articles about film, performance art, literature, gender and queer representation from Israel/Palestine, Turkey, and the US. Since 2013, Shirly has been curating art shows, public programs, and community events in NYC and across the US. Shirly serves as co-director of Tzedek Lab, a network of practitioners and organizers in the Jewish world, and is a member leader of JVP-NY. Shirly’s first book, Documentary Cinema in Israel-Palestine: Performance, the Body, the Home came out in July 2021with Bloomsbury/IB Tauris.

Helga Tawil-Souri is an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication; Associate Professor of Middle East and Islamic Studies; Director of Graduate Studies at Media, Culture, and Communication at NYU. Helga works on issues to do with technology, media, culture, territory and politics in the Middle East, with a particular focus on Palestine-Israel. Her work seeks to challenge the notion of an open and borderless world by looking at how technologies and their infrastructures -- such as cell phones and the internet -- impose new forms of borders and controls and work in explicitly territorial and political ways.

CONGRATS | Areej Sabbagh-Khoury Selected as 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar

The Center for Palestine Studies congratulates Areej Sabbagh-Khoury on her selection by The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation as a 2022 Guggenheim Distinguished Scholar.

”The Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation is pleased to announce the selection of its 2022 HFG Distinguished Scholars. The twelve leading researchers, chosen through a rigorous peer-review competition, are exploring important problems of violence in the world.

The Distinguished Scholars are investigating a myriad of issues, including violence against women, policing and crime, radicalization, and the environmental parameters of war and conflict.”

Read more

Areej Sabbagh-Khoury is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She received her doctorate at Tel Aviv University and completed research posts at Columbia, New York, Brown, and Tufts Universities. Areej was the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod fellow at CPS in Fall 2015. The title of her research topic for the 2022 Distinguished Scholar award is Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Disintegration and Intracommunal Violence Among the Palestinian Citizens in Israel.

APPLY | PARC extends deadline for NEH research fellowship competition!

PARC announces an EXTENDED DEADLINE for its 10th National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Fellowship competition for field-based research in Palestine in the humanities or research that embraces a humanistic approach and methods. Applicants must be scholars who have earned their PhD or completed their professional training. Applicants must be U.S. citizens or have lived in the United States for the last three years. Fellowship awards are $5,000 per month for a minimum of four up to a maximum of ten months of research. EXTENDED DEADLINE: Applications are due January 31, 2022.

For more info visit PARC’s website.