Join CPS for a Palestine Library book talk with Perla Issa about her recent publication, The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions: An Everyday Perspective from Nahr el-Bared Camp (University of California Press, 2021). Rashid Khalidi will moderate the conversation.

The Endurance of Palestinian Political Factions is an ethnographic study of Palestinian political factions in Lebanon through an immersion in daily home life. Perla Issa asks how political factions remain the center of political life in the Palestinian camps in the face of mounting criticism. Through an examination of the daily, mundane practices of refugees in Nahr el-Bared camp in particular, this book shows how intimate, interpersonal, and kin-based relations are transformed into political networks and offers a fresh analysis of how those networks are in turn metamorphosed into political structures. By providing a detailed and intimate account of this process, this book reveals how factions are produced and reproduced in everyday life despite widespread condemnation.
Read more.

Perla Issa is a researcher at the Institute for Palestine Studies in Beirut, Lebanon.

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

Join CPS for a book talk with Leila Farsakh, editor of Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition, published by University of California Press (2021).

Introduction and moderation by Timothy Mitchell.

About Rethinking Statehood in Palestine
The quest for an inclusive and independent state has been at the center of the Palestinian national struggle for a very long time. This book critically explores the meaning of Palestinian statehood and the challenges that face alternative models to it. Giving prominence to a young set of diverse Palestinian scholars, this groundbreaking book shows how notions of citizenship, sovereignty, and nationhood are being rethought within the broader context of decolonization. Bringing forth critical and multifaceted engagements with what modern Palestinian self-determination entails, Rethinking Statehood sets the terms of debate for the future of Palestine beyond partition. Read more.

Leila Farsakh is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts Boston. She researches the political economy of development, with specific focus on the Middle East region and the Arab/Israeli conflict. She is author of Palestinian Labor Migration to Israel: Labour, Land and Occupation and coeditor of The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond. Read more.

Timothy Mitchell is William B Ransford Professor of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He is a political theorist and historian. His areas of research include the place of colonialism in the making of modernity, the material and technical politics of the Middle East, and the role of economics and other forms of expert knowledge in the government of collective life. Read more.

Join CPS and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law for a conversation with Dr. Gustavo Barbosa and Maya Mikdashi (Rutgers University) about Barbosa’s new book, The Best of Hard Times: Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon (Syracuse University Press, 2021). Introduction by Brinkley Messick.

The Best of Hard Times explores the gendered identities of two generations of men in the Shatila Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Gustavo Barbosa compares the fida’iyyin, the men who served as freedom fighters to reconquer Palestine in the 1970s, to the shabab, their sons who lead seemingly mundane lives with limited access to power. While the fida’iyyinn displayed their masculinity through active resistance and fighting to return to their homeland, the shabab have a more nuanced relationship to Palestine and articulate their gender belonging in alternative ways.

Through vivid ethnographic stories, Barbosa critically engages with certain trends in feminism, calling attention to their limits and considering nimble views on gender. Instead of presenting the shabab as emasculated or experiencing a crisis of masculinity, the book shows the pliability of masculinity in time and space and argues that “gender” has limited purchase to capture the experiences of today’s youth from Shatila. Based on two years of fieldwork, The Best of Hard Times answers the burgeoning demand for anthropological literature on Arab masculinities and portrays refugees as inventive actors rather than agentless victims of circumstances beyond their control. The Best of Hard Times is a tour de force combining highbrow theory with gripping ethnography, challenging many of the stereotypes on gender, power, statehood, and the role of Islam in the Middle East.

Receive 40% off with discount code 05BEST22 when you purchase The Best of Hard Times from Syracuse University Press before April 15, 2022.

PANELISTS
Gustavo Barbosa in an Associate Researcher at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense, in Rio de Janeiro. He holds a PhD in Anthropology from the LSE, MScs in Anthropology from the LSE and Museu Nacional and BScs in Diplomacy, Social Sciences and Journalism. He has published a number of articles in Portuguese and English in specialised journals and edited volumes. His book The Best of Hard Times - Palestinian Refugee Masculinities in Lebanon was published in January 2022 by Syracuse University Press. His academic interests lie in political and medical anthropology, gender, masculinities, refugees, hope and new reproductive technologies. His webpage is gustavo-barbosa.com.

Maya Mikdashi is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Women’s and Gender Studies and a lecturer in the program in Middle East Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Maya is an anthropologist (PhD Columbia University, 2014) who is deeply engaged in ethnographic, legal, and archival theory and methodology. She currently is completing a book manuscript that examines the war on terror, sexual difference, secularism, and state power in the contemporary Middle East from the vantage point of Lebanon. More info.

Brinkley Messick is Professor of Anthropology and of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia University. He is the author of The Calligraphic State (1993), which was awarded the Albert Hourani Prize of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, and Shariʿa Scripts: A Historical Anthropology (2018). Brink was a founding Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies (2010-15), and is the Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia.

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.

Attendance and Registration Policy:
This event is organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University and presented byNew Books in the Arts & Sciences. It is cosponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies, the Middle East Institute, MESAAS and the Office of the Divisional Deans in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences.

The event will take place virtually over Zoom. Registration is required.

Please email disability@columbia.edu to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs. This event will be recorded. By being electronically present, you consent to the SOF/Heyman using such video for promotional purposes.

Use code E21HCHBG for 30% off book purchase at Duke University Press.

About the Author
Gil Hochberg is Ransford Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, and Middle East Studies at Columbia University and Chair of MESAAS. Her first book, In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs, and the Limits of Separatist Imagination examines the complex relationship between the signifiers “Arab” and “Jew” in contemporary Jewish and Arab literatures and cultural imagination. Her second book, Visual Occupations: Vision and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, is a study of the visual politics of the Israeli-Palestinian terrain and the emergence of a “conflict” or the sight of a conflict.

About the Speakers
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, and Chair of the Governing Board of the Society of Fellows/Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society, which won the Albert Hourani Annual Book Award from the Middle East Studies Association in 2002, and The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology.

Gayatri Gopinath is an associate professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and director of the Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality at New York University. Gopinath is perhaps best known for her book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, which received article-length reviews in a number of journals.

Brian Larkin is the Director of Graduate Studies and a Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College, Columbia University. His research focuses on the ethnography and history of media in Nigeria. Most broadly he examines the introduction of media technologies into Nigeria—cinema, radio, digital media—and the religious, political, and cultural changes they bring about. Larkin is the author of Signal and Noise: Media Infrastructure and Urban Culture in Nigeria and, with Lila Abu-Lughod and Faye Ginsburg, co-editor of Media Worlds: Anthropology on New Terrain.

Debashree Mukherjee is Assistant Professor at MESAAS at Columbia University. Dr. Mukherjee has published in various academic journals and anthologies, and is a core editor with the peer-reviewed journal, BioScope: South Asian Screen Studies. Trained as a filmmaker, she has worked in Bombay’s film and television industries on projects such as Omkara (dir. Vishal Bhardwaj, 2006). Committed to the missions of public and digital humanities, Dr. Mukherjee has curated exhibitions such as “Maya Mahal” (film ephemera from the Priya Paul collection, 2013) and “A Cinematic Imagination,” (production stills from the Josef Wirsching archive, 2017) and is actively involved with the online film annotation platform www.indiancine.ma. 

A Conversation with David Lloyd, Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian about the recent volume When Politics are Sacralized: Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism, published by Cambridge University Press in May 2021. Nadia Abu El-Haj will moderate the conversation.

This event is organized by the Center for Palestine Studies and co-sponsored by the Institute for Religion, Culture and Public Life.

About When Politics are Sacralized
Over the years, there have been increasing intersections between religious claims and nationalism and their power to frame and govern world politics. When Politics Are Sacralized interdisciplinarily and comparatively examines the fusion between religious claims and nationalism and studies its political manifestations. State and world politics, when determined or framed by nationalism fused with religious claims, can provoke protracted conflict, infuse explicit religious beliefs into politics, and legitimize violence against racialized groups. This volume investigates how, through hegemonic nationalism, states invoke religious claims in domestic and international politics, sacralizing the political. Studying Israel, India, the Palestinian National Movement and Hamas, Sri Lanka, Saudi Arabia, Serbia, Iran, and Northern Ireland, the thirteen chapters engage with the visibility, performativity, role, and political legitimation of religion and nationalism. The authors analyze how and why sacralization affects political behaviors apparent in national and international politics, produces state-sponsored violence, and shapes conflict. Read more.

Speakers

David Lloyd is Distinguished Professor of English at University of California Riverside. Read more.

Nadim N. Rouhana is Professor of International Affairs and Conflict Studies at Tufts University. Read more.

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. Read more.

Moderator

Nadia Abu El-Haj is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University. Read more.

Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a talk with Kareem Rabie and Wassim Ghantous about Rabie's new book, Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank (Duke Press, 2021).

About Palestine Is Throwing a Party and the Whole World Is Invited:
In 2008, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad invited international investors to the first-ever Palestine Investment Conference, which was designed to jump-start the process of integrating Palestine into the global economy. As Fayyad described the conference, Palestine is “throwing a party, and the whole world is invited.” In this book Kareem Rabie examines how the conference and Fayyad's rhetoric represented a wider shift in economic and political practice in ways that oriented state-scale Palestinian politics toward neoliberal globalization rather than a diplomatic two-state solution. Rabie demonstrates that private firms, international aid organizations, and the Palestinian government in the West Bank focused on large-scale private housing development in an effort toward state-scale economic stability and market building. This approach reflected the belief that a thriving private economy would lead to a free and functioning Palestinian state. Yet, as Rabie contends, these investment-based policies have maintained the status quo of occupation and Palestine's subordinate and suspended political and economic relationship with Israel. Read more

You can order the book from Duke (or, outside of North America, from CAP) for 30% off with code E21RABIE.

Kareem Rabie is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The University of Illinois, Chicago. His work focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank.

Previously he was Assistant Professor of Anthropology at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at the University of Oxford Centre on Migration, Policy, and Society (COMPAS). 

Kareem spent 2020-2021 on research leave supported by the ACLS, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and the Graham Foundation for Advancement in the Fine Arts, and was a visiting fellow at CUNY’s Center for Place, Culture, and Politics; and Committee on Globalization and Social Change. Visit Kareem’s website.

Wassim Ghantous is the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University. While at CPS Wassim is working on his book manuscript, The Rise of the Israeli War Machine: Palestinians’ Encounters of Spectral Violence, Destructive Velocities, Intensive Elimination. The book explores the increasingly diffused operations of the contemporary Israeli regime of colonization in rural areas of the West Bank – the “frontier zone” – and the ways in which Palestinians develop sumud (steadfastness) maneuvers to evade this diffused regime. Read more.

Wassim completed his Ph.D. in Peace and Development Studies at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2020. In 2020-21 he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Space and Political Agency Research Group (SPARG) located at the Faculty of Management and Business at the University of Tampere, Finland. SPARG is part of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence in Research on the Relational and Territorial Politics of Bordering, Identities and Transnationalization. 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.