Read the press release on the A.M. Qattan Foundation’s website here.
NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
As part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', CPS x LIFTA presents a LOVE & INTIMACY video series. These short films center intergenerational outlooks on love and intimacy in Palestine and the diaspora, with discussions highlighting—but not limited to— disconnects, desires, relationships, trauma, teaching, learning, and beyond. This series includes intimate interviews and conversations held between Palestinians who share a close relationship, including old friends, parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren, lovers, cousins, and more. Conversations explore what has been inherited and what is being shed, as well as the ways in which taking care of ourselves and each other is to care for the collective—now and into the future. Dialogue moves beyond topics of love in the human-to-human sense, extending to the deep connections one shares with an object, time, smell, memory, land, and ritual. This week we share conversations held between Leena and Nour, Marcelo and Constantino, and Justin and Elie. We’d like to thank all who participated in this series for your time, energy, and openness. You can watch the videos and follow the series on palestineinbetween.com, a blog and accompanying website to this program where we will be sharing original content and reposting content by Palestinians all over the world.
Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave. Spanish to English translation by Karime Sierra.
'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN' is presented by CPS + LIFTA with Lena Mansour and Cher Asad with support from The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, the Center for Archaeology at Columbia University and the Columbia Global Center | Amman.
Join the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit on 5 August 2021 for a live screening and conversation with artist Tali Keren, Nadia L. Abu El-Haj, Professor and co-director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, and Kareem Estefan, writer, critic and PHD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. The three will discuss a new work by Keren titled Un-Charting, on view at MOCAD’s Black Box gallery through August 8, that explores the way myth, fantasy, and western Christian evangelism have shaped the historical legacy of Israel-Palestine. Using the film as a point of departure, the conversation will center questions around the formation of political ideology and structural violence—through narrative building and archeological practices—exploring these at the intersection of personal identity and ethno-nationalism. This conversation will be followed by a Q&A and will take place on Zoom at the link below.
JOIN THE CONVERSATION
Tune in to this public program on Zoom to engage with the panelists and submit questions to the Q+A discussion.
RELATED EXHIBITION
UN-CHARTING
JUN 4 – AUG 8, 2021
MORE ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS
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. She also serves as Vice President and Vice Chair of Board at The Institute for Palestine Studies in Washington, DC. The recipient of numerous awards, including from the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner Gren Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, the Harvard Academy for Area and International Studies, the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, and the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, she is the author of numerous journal articles published on topics ranging from the history of archaeology in Palestine to the question of race and genomics today. Abu El-Haj has published two books: Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (2001), 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 (2012). While Abu El-Haj’s two books to date have focused on historical sciences (archaeology, and genetic history), her third book, forthcoming in 2022 from Verso, examines the field of (military) psychiatry, and explores the complex ethical and political implications of shifting psychiatric and public understandings of the trauma of American soldiers.
Kareem Estefan is a writer, editor, and PhD candidate in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. His dissertation, “Witnessing as Worldbuilding: Imagining Repair and Decolonization in Palestinian Visual Culture,” examines the practices of contemporary Palestinian artists and filmmakers who speculate about potential histories and decolonized futures, refusing the humanitarian injunction to produce “visual evidence” of victimized subjects. Kareem’s writing has appeared in publications including 4 Columns, Art in America, Artforum, BOMB, Frieze, Ibraaz, the Journal of Palestine Studies, Movement Research Performance Journal, Third Text, and World Records. He is co-editor of Assuming Boycott: Resistance, Agency, and Cultural Production (OR Books, 2017), an anthology of essays on boycott campaigns, transnational solidarities, and (self-)censorship in the arts. He is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Darat al-Funun Dissertation Fellowship and a 2021-2022 Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Fellowship. Kareem holds an MFA in Art Criticism and Writing from SVA and a BA in Comparative Literature from New York University.
Tali Keren is a media artist and educator based in New York. Her performances, videos, and installations focus on the formation of ideology and histories of settler-colonial violence. Keren’s recent solo exhibitions include; Un-Charting, Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; The Great Seal at Eyebeam, New York and at the Center for Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv; and Heat Signature at Ludlow 38, MINI Goethe Institute, New York. Her work has been exhibited and performed at Anthology Film Archives, New York; the Museum of the Moving Image, New York; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Tel Aviv Museum, Tel Aviv, Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; the Jewish Museum, New York; Museums Quartier, Vienna; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen; the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art; and in New York City’s Times Square. Keren received her BFA in 2009 from the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem and earned an MFA from Columbia University, in New York, in 2016. She was an artist in residence at ISCP, NARS Foundation, and BRICworkspace, New York. Keren is currently an artist in residence at the Queens Museum, New York, and is working on a collaborative project that will open at the museum in the fall of 2021.
For more information and to visit the event page on MOCAD’s website, click here.
BroadwayWorld announces the launch of the Center for Palestine Studies new initiative, NO PLACE / LA MAKAN.
”NO PLACE/LA MAKAN will be a platform for Palestinian playwrights to explore contemporary themes through an historic medium of performance -- radio. For the inaugural 2021-2022 season, four plays have been commissioned from artists based in Palestine and in the diaspora, each of which will receive two world premieres in the form of dedicated Arabic and English productions. The 2021-2022 commissioned playwrights are: Khawla Ibraheem (London-Jenin), Ismail Khalidi (Tennis at Nablus, Returning to Haifa), Bashar Murkus (The Museum, Hash), and Dalia Taha (Graduation, Fireworks). Collectively, these writers have had works produced on some of the world's leading stages, including The Public Theatre (New York), the Young Vic (London), The Royal Court Theatre (London), and the Tokyo International Festival, as well as residencies with The Sundance Institute Theatre Lab and the MacDowell Colony.
The NO PLACE/LA MAKAN program will provide the opportunity for playwrights to develop their new work within a community of actors, directors, dramaturgs, scholars, and the other writers in their cohort. The writers will be joined by Artistic Advisors Selma Dabbagh (The Brick, BBC Radio 4; Sleep It Off, Dr. Schott, WDR Radio Germany) and Ahmed Masoud (Escape from Gaza, BBC Radio 4), who will support the artists in crafting their pieces for radio.”
A conversation with two celebrated Palestinian writers, Selma Dabbagh and Ahmed Masoud, about what it means to write for radio and their experiences writing in, about, and outside of Palestine. Opening remarks by Brinkley Messick. Q&A session moderated by A. George Bajalia.
This event on 08 July 2021 opened the Center’s NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان program, which will commission, develop, produce, and distribute four new radio plays by Palestinian playwrights in 2021-2022. A series of ancillary events will build skills in writing and producing within the audio medium and be open to the public.
For more information about the NO PLACE program and the speakers in this event, click here.
NO PLACE | LA MAKAN | لا مكان is a project of the Center for Palestine Studies produced in partnership with the A. M. Qattan Foundation, with support from Taawon, The Tides Foundation, and the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University.
Missed 'The Israeli Academy and the Palestinian Struggle' on 23 June 2021 ? You can now watch the event recording on the Center’s YouTube Channel.
The event was organized by Academia for Equality, and co-sponsored by The Center for Palestine Studies, The Middle East Institute at Columbia University, Association of Black Anthropologists, Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association, Scientists For Palestine, British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (BRISMES), Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies, San Francisco State University, Department of Anthropology, University of the Western Cape (South Africa), and NYU Gallatin Human Rights Initiative.
Join Professor Jeffrey Sachs and historian Rashid Khalidi as they discuss Khalidi's book The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017 and the long history of disenfranchisement against the Palestinian people.
The Book Club with Jeffrey Sachs is brought to you by the SDG Academy, the flagship education initiative of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network. Learn more and get involved at bookclubwithjeffreysachs.org.
Listen now on Apple Podcasts / Spotify
“Said’s Palestine” (Jun 1, 2021) engaged in an analysis and discussion of contemporary conditions in Palestine through the terms of analysis Edward Said’s corpus of work offers us. The discussion ranged over what Said’s terms enable in analysis and comprehension of the immediate and longer term causes, their limits in accounting for these conditions, and ways to think about possible futures.
Nadia Abu El-Haj, Barnard College and Columbia University
Esmat Elhalaby, UC Davis
Saree Makdisi, UC Los Angeles
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Hebrew University
Judith Butler, UC Berkeley
Visit The University of California Humanities Research Institute’s website for additional resources mentioned during the panel.