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.

WATCH | Final set of LOVE & INTIMACY videos

We are happy to share the final set of interviews for the LOVE & INTIMACY video project. The LOVE & INTIMACY series is part of 'Palestine, IN-BETWEEN', a Center for Palestine Studies x LIFTA collaboration. 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 Marah and Hafsa, Tamara and Faiza, Serene and Nayrouz, and Sharon and Lilly. 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. All videos are made available on YouTube. A special thank you to Muna Daher for editing these videos, and Lena Mansour for Arabic to English translation.

'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.

Intro graphic by Ashay Bhave.

CALL | Abstracts for conference "Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine"

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.

APPLY | Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-doctoral Award in Palestine Studies

The Center for Palestine Studies is now accepting applications to the 2022-2023 Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Post-doctoral Fellowship in Palestine Studies!

The Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (IAL) Award is a year-long fellowship that recognizes and fosters innovative and ground-breaking scholarship on issues related to Palestine and Palestinians. The award will support a scholar working on a book project in any field of the humanities or social sciences who will spend the academic year at Columbia University in New York, pursuing their research and writing, contributing to curricular matters, and participating in the intellectual life of the Center for Palestine Studies.

Established in 2010, the IAL Award was made possible through the generosity of the late Abdel Mohsin Al-Qattan in honor of his friend, the Palestinian scholar and intellectual, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (1929-2001). Their close friendship began in the aftermath of the Nakba of 1948 and evolved into a shared commitment to justice for Palestinians to be realized through support for excellence in higher education and scholarship. Major support for the IAL Award comes from the A.M. Qattan Foundation with additional support from individual donors.

The international competition is open to post-doctoral scholars who share the mission of the Center for Palestine Studies to advance the production and circulation of knowledge on Palestinian history, culture, society, and politics through outstanding scholarship.

For more information including eligibility and supporting materials, visit the IAL section of the CPS website.

For questions about the fellowship or application, email palestine@columbia.edu.

READ | Translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem

An Arabic translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem is available in Omran 38 (Autumn): 175-206.

About the article
This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. “Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" was originally published in Critical Inquiry 47 in 2020.

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

​Aamer Ibraheem is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York.

Omran is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the social sciences and published by The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Issue 38 is a special edition on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict.

About Omran’s special issue Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict
Following an introduction by guest editor Nadim Rouhana,  this issue includes six studies in a special issue on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Struggle: "Settler Colonialism or Apartheid: Do We Have to Choose?" by Azmi Bishara; "Zionism and the Dilemma of Legitimizing Settler Colonialism: Religious Discourse as a Response to the Palestinian Resistance" by Nadim Rouhana; "Rethinking the Condition of Indirect Rule: Metamorphosis of the Israeli Colonial Governance and the Palestinian Resistance" by Hani Awad & Maryam Hawari; "Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism" by Lorenzo Veracini; "Where in the World is Palestine?" by Hamid Dabashi; and "International Law and Settler Colonialism in Historical Palestine" by Ilan Pappe. Also provided is a translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem.

The book review section includes Ahmed Mamoun's review of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi; Yara Nassar's review of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial by Somdeep Sen; Maryam AlHajri's review of Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani; and, finally, Ihab Maharmeh's review of Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel by Andrew Ross.