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
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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
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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.

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.

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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.

ATTEND

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.

READING LIST

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.

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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

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