WATCH + READ | Film and the Toxic Politics of Waste: A Roundtable

Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek), Waste Underground, 2017. 14:40 minutes, HD video. Copyright: Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.

Waste Underground by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins (with videographer Ali Al-Deek) is available online in e-flux Issue #127 (May 2022) along with a roundtable discussion on “Toxic Politics of Waste” with Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, Bassem Saad, Elizabeth Saleh, and Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins.

This group discussion explores how politics, toxicity, and subjectivities intersect, and highlights the role of film as a medium for approaching these subjects. The management of waste and the experiences of its toxic afterlives are riddled with uncertainty. How can we make sense of toxicity’s different temporalities and the entanglements of human and nonhuman entities it creates? More specifically, how can different forms of art and knowledge-production account for the often invisible trajectories of waste, its slow and difficult-to-trace effects, and the complexity of the political forces at play? 

Hanna Baumann, Adriana Massidda, and Elizabeth Saleh were joined by the makers of two short films. Waste Underground (15’, 2017), by anthropologist Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins and cinematographer Ali al-Deek, explores a landfill in the West Bank as underground storage space through the lens of Palestinian futurity. Kink Retrograde (19’, 2019), by artist and writer Bassem Saad, is set on a landfill on the Lebanese coast in the midst of the country’s ongoing waste crisis. Due to the places where these films are situated, the discussion focuses on questions of waste in Palestine and Lebanon, but also considers these particular situations in the context of global circulations and broader questions around the politics of toxicity.

READ | "Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine"

CPS celebrates the publication of a new article co-authored by Wassim Ghantous, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow 2021-2022.

”Dromoelimination: Accelerating settler colonialism in Palestine”
By Wassim Ghantous and Mikko Joronen

This paper examines the eliminatory speed of Israeli settler colonialism, particularly the ways in which settler organizations aim to accelerate the pace of elimination at the colonial frontiers in Palestine. We show, by focusing on the settler NGO Regavim, how such settler entrepreneurs constantly develop new techniques that challenge the slow and creeping eliminatory pace of state’s administrative, legal and security bodies with an intensifying eliminatory speed we call ‘dromoelimination’. By closely elaborating the ongoing events in the West Bank village of Susiya, we argue that dromoelimination operates, firstly, through accelerative state-settler dynamics that traverses beyond the eliminatory functions of the state while at the same time fundamentally reconfiguring them; and secondly, by turning Palestinian life and struggle against dispossession, forced displacement and destruction increasingly vulnerable to intensified temporalities of ‘depleting time’. Settler colonialism, we contend, becomes comprehensible in a more tangible, complex and spatially nuanced terms when looked through the speed and pace of its movement: that is, through intensified and accelerated eliminatory rhythms – of dromoelimination.

Full citation
Ghantous, Wassim, and Mikko Joronen. “Dromoelimination: Accelerating Settler Colonialism in Palestine.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, Apr. 2022, doi:10.1177/02637758221090968.

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme at MoMA

THROUGH JUNE 26
MoMA

Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s multipart project May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth (2020–ongoing) examines how communities bear witness to experiences of violence, loss, displacement, and forced migration. Since the early 2010s, Abbas and Abou-Rahme have collected online recordings of everyday people singing and dancing in communal spaces in Iraq, Palestine, Syria, and Yemen. The work brings digital traces of these performing bodies together with new performances created by the artists with dancer Rima Baransi and electronic musicians Haykal, Julmud, and Makimakkuk, working in Ramallah, Palestine. According to Abbas and Abou-Rahme, through song and dance, “these fractured communities are resisting their own erasure and laying claim to space, self, and collectivity once more.”

This evolving work, co-commissioned by MoMA and Dia Art Foundation, will be presented as an online platform and physical exhibition. The first part, titled Postscript: after everything is extracted, launched in December 2020, as part of Dia’s Artist Web Projects Series. In March 2022, Dia’s online platform was updated with the artists’ extensive collection of found online recordings and the original performances. The exhibition in MoMA’s Marie-Josée and Henry Kravis Studio will bring the footage into the gallery through an immersive, multichannel sound and moving-image installation titled Only sounds that tremble through us.

May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth considers performance—whether in the form of song, spoken word, dance, or gesture—as a political act at a time marked by myriad forms of violence against entire communities.

For more info and timed tickets, visit MoMA’s website.

RELATED CPS EVENT
TUESDAY
26 April 2022

Join CMES, Brown University, MEI, Columbia University and CPS, Columbia University for an online conversation with Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas. We will discuss their project "May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth" which examines how people are witness to and narrate experiences of violence, loss, erasure, displacement, and forced migration through performance. The conversation will also address Ruanne and Basel’s wider art practice which is at the intersection of performativity, political imaginaries, the body and virtuality.

To register for the event, click here.

CALL | Paper Abstracts for 'Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine' Due 4/30/22

Don’t forget to submit your abstract by 30 April 2022.

Call for Papers: Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine
Birzeit University, New Directions in Palestine Studies, Brown University, Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University, European Centre for Palestine Studies, University of Exeter, Centre for Palestine Studies, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London, and Institute for Palestine Studies call for papers for the upcoming conference, “Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine.”

The British Mandate (1922-1948) represents over a quarter-century in the modern history of Palestine during which the groundwork was laid for the usurpation of Palestinian political rights and the establishment of a Zionist state. It is a glaring instance of a colonial enterprise expressly designed to disenfranchise indigenous peoples conducted under the umbrella of international legitimacy. It is also the first and last time in modern history that the whole of Palestine has existed as a single polity, bringing together Palestinian Arabs and Jews, natives and settlers, and colonized and colonizers, within one political-legal framework, albeit on radically unequal terms. The hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Mandate is an apt occasion to revisit and reassess it as an episode in the history of Palestine.

The conference is provisionally scheduled for October 2022 and is planned to be held in a hybrid format, with an in-person component in Palestine, circumstances permitting. Abstracts of approximately 300 words should be submitted for blind review, in English or Arabic, to the following email address: conference@palestine-studies.org.

For more info, click here.

ATTEND | Race, Racism and Palestine Panel, CMES Brown University

 
 

TUESDAY
19 APR 2022
6:00-7:30pm ET

Palestinians have long developed a racial theory of Zionism. The Oslo Peace Process, initiated in the early 1990s, subsumed these theories and others that poignantly framed the Palestinian freedom struggle as one against settler colonization, into a peace and justice framework that eschewed the consequential dimension of power. The collapse of the Peace Process at the Camp David talks in 2000 and the Second Palestinian Intifada that followed created fertile grounds for Palestinian advocates and intellectuals to return to a racial and colonial analysis to describe their conditions of unfreedom. The 2014 Gaza-Ferguson moment, marking renewals of Black Palestinian transnational solidarity, catalyzed these analytical returns and acutely re-centered the questions of race, racism, and Palestine among analysts, activists, and scholars. This panel featuring leading scholars of race, law, colonialism, and political economy will take on some of these questions to address racial ideologies, Palestinian intellectual traditions, anti-Blackness, legacies of slavery in the Middle East, and sovereignty frameworks to undergird and advance these ongoing conversations.

Speakers
Noura Erakat, Rutgers University, NJ

Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University, PA

John Reynolds, Maynooth University, Ireland

Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara

Lana Tatour, University of South Wales, Australia

This event is organized by CMES, Brown University. For more info, click here.

ATTEND | Gaza on Screen

 
 

Join the Center for Experimental Ethnography for a film screening and conversation series, "Gaza on Screen", curated by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Hadeel Assali. Register now to gain links to screen the films. Zoom link for joining the webinar will be circulated the week of the event.

Friday, April 15th at 7pm
Gaza on Screen: Attending to the Fugitive
REGISTER NOW
A conversation and screening with Nayrouz Abu Hatoum and Hadeel Assali, joined by Anna Shah Hoque. The evening will feature resistance videos and discussion.

​Saturday, April 16th at 2pm
Gaza on Screen: The Archaeological Imagination
REGISTER NOW
Nadia Yaqub will present the films “Living Archaeology” by Forensic Architecture (10 min, 2022) and “The Apollo of Gaza” by Nicolas Wadimoff (78b min, 2018). This will be followed with a Q&A led by Nadia Yaqub featuring Yasmine El Khoudary.

For more info, click here.

CONGRATS | CPS Announces Alessandra Amin as Incoming IAL Fellow

The Center for Palestine Studies is thrilled to announce Alessandra Amin as the incoming Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow!

Alessandra Amin 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. The study considers how modern Palestinian art assumed new aesthetic and philosophical valences during this period, charting the emergence of the dream and the maternal body as nested modes of relating to Palestine in painting and graphic arts. Drawing on multi-sited archival and ethnographic research in Arabic, English, and French, it establishes the “dream-state” as a historically situated framework for conceptualizing Palestine, arguing that the language of dreaming negotiates the reckless hope of the revolutionary moment with the profoundly disorienting experiences of exile and erasure. Crucially, this framework marks Palestine’s difference from nations that exist in sovereign, territorialized form; for Palestinians, unlike citizens of self-determined countries, “imagining” the nation is not a subconscious means of belonging to a social group but a complex act of mourning, speculation, resistance, and survival. Focusing primarily on the work of Mustafa Hallaj, Samira Badran, Ismail Shammout, and Juliana Seraphim, Mother Figure brings established nationalist aesthetics into conversation with previously understudied imaginaries of surrealism and science-fiction through the ubiquitous form of the maternal body. More than a motif, this form is a central prism whose diverse facets reflect the hopes and anxieties of the nascent dream-state.

Alessandra will receive her doctorate in Art History from UCLA in June 2022. 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.

Alessandra will be in residence at the Center for Academic Year 2022-23.