The Politics of Life and Death
- Columbia Journalism School 2950 Broadway New York, NY, 10027 United States (map)
The Politics of Life and Death: Post/Decolonial Encounters, Palestinians, Kashmiris, And Tamils
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Symposium Abstract
The symposium engages intersecting imaginaries and histories that impact Palestinians, Kashmiris, and Tamils. Complex modes of power and history structure conquest, appropriation, and occupation across shifting colonial, (post)colonial, and decolonial moments. Peoples and landscapes are witness to monumental partitions, erasures, and Nakbas (catastrophes), producing states of exception organized through securitization, majoritarianism, and militarism. The symposium is concerned with issues of subjugation, minoritization, and racialization; and persistent efforts to articulate/silence truth and practice resistance, freedom, and self-determination. We draw on the efforts of native-local and allied intellectuals, activists, artists, and scholars of colonized peoples and geographies to decolonize knowledge and facilitate counter-memory. Works that strive to reorganize the senses, engender innovative methodologies, and...
Talk Abstracts
The perpetrator is among the myriad subjects constituted within the history of colonial and Eurocentric nation-state formation. The nation-building process constitutes perpetrators, alongside citizens, enemies, refugees, natives, and others. The construction of the perpetrator-ruler is inseparable from the specific histories that produce the pre-perpetrator subjects who struggle to attain rule within a new state.
How does the biography of the postcolonial nation-state appear to peoples who live in its neocolonized margins in the present? ‘Postcolonial condition’ has mostly been examined by scholars from global metropoles, from within postcolonial-national centers, or in diaspora. The spatial and political location of this critical scholarship is structured by the disjunctive as well as the dialogic arc posited between the former colonizers and the formerly colonized-now multiply situated subjects. While this location produces invaluable insights into the unacknowledged forms of experience and knowledge within the postcolony, as well as re-inscribes the constitutive heterogeneity of the postcolonial publics,
In his work, “I was not there”, Raul Hilberg (1988), writes about the dilemma facing Holocaust historians: “I have had to reconstruct the process of destruction in my mind combining the documents into paragraphs, the paragraphs into chapters, the chapters into book… I had no anxieties about artistic failure. Now, I have been told that I have indeed succeeded. And that is a cause of some worry…” This paper is an attempt to deal with that “worry”- the inability of social sciences to fully
Transactions in counter-memory amplify the bodily history of unknown graves and death-bound subjects (JanMohamed, 2005) in contemporary Kashmir. The talk explores networks of individual and communitarian remembrances and sensory memory, honoring the transformative, decolonial scope of the task performed by Atta Mohammad of Baramulla District. In June 2008, Mohammad, then 68, testified to his work as a gravedigger and caretaker of unknown graves at Chehal Bimyar and to burying 203 bodies on a hillside adjacent to the Jhelum river between 2002-2006.
In the ‘minefields’ of partitioned landscapes, contemplating one’s fieldwork, unless retroactively, is a luxury—for leaving the ‘minefield’ alive is, literally, one of the supreme research objectives. Ironically, while fieldwork within historic Palestine minimizes the proximity between life and death, the work in cemeteries—as morbid as it could be—instigates two songs of life: hope and freedom. This talk narrates some of the empirical serendipities of my project, The Palestinian Living Cemetery, through which ‘hope’ and ‘freedom’ are qualified anew.
People
Richard Shapiro is Vice President of Education and Public Policy at Pixatel, an organization that works with innovative e-education in socially disadvantaged sites through fostering public/private partnerships. Shapiro has been involved in creating emancipatory education, focused on social justice, ecological sustainability, and cultural diversity. Shapiro’s work focuses on the dynamics of othering, contemporary forms of racism,
Brinkley M. Messick is Professor, Department of Anthropology, Director of Graduate Studies in Islamic Studies, and affiliated with the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University. Messick specializes in the anthropology of law, legal history, written culture, and the circulation and interpretation of Islamic law. Messick received his Ph.D. from Princeton. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for Social Sciences
Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies and chair of the Department of History at Columbia University. He received his B.A. from Yale University in 1970, and his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1974. He has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, Georgetown University, and at the University of Chicago. He is past President of the Middle East Studies Association, and the editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies.
Mohamad Junaid is a Doctoral Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His writings focus on military occupation, space, memory, martyrdom, and violence in Kashmir. Junaid has contributed to edited volumes; Everyday Occupations: Experiencing Militarism in South Asia and the Middle East (2013); U
Rudhramoorthy Cheran is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Criminology at the University of Windsor. Cheran teaches in the areas of migration, national and ethnic conflicts, transnationalism, diaspora studies and globalization. The recipient of several research awards, his current research focuses on the role of peace builders and alternate forms of governance by nations without states in Myanmar, Indonesia, Nepal and Sri Lanka
Nadia Abu El-Haj is Co-Director, Center for Palestine Studies Center at Columbia University and Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Barnard College. Her work straddles the disciplines of anthropology and history of science. Concerned most generally with the relationships among scientific practices, social imaginaries and political regimes, she has examined the work of specific historical sciences within the context of their own historical and disciplinary conditions of possibility.
Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh is Associate Professor of Philosophy, and Cultural and Arab Studies at Birzeit University. His work focuses on cultural representations and the politics of Palestinian identity, in addition to his works on Arab poetry, art criticism, and translation. As a Fulbright Scholar, he is spending the 2015-1016 academic year at the Center for Palatine Studies at Columbia University
Angana P. Chatterji is Co-chair, Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights Project at the Center for Race and Gender at University of California, Berkeley. A cultural anthropologist, her work focuses on political conflict; gender, power, violence; nationalism, minoritization, racialization; religion in the public sphere; and reparatory justice
Gil Anidjar is Professor in the Departments of Religion, Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies (MESAAS), and the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society (ICLS), and is affiliated faculty at the Center for Palestine Studies, at Columbia University. He has been a visiting professor at several universities worldwide.
Co-sponsors
The Middle East Institute
Columbia University Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies
Birzeit University
Political Conflict, Gender, and People's Rights Project
Center for Race and Gender
University of California
Berkeley
The Windsor-Birzeit Dignity Initiative
University of Windsor
Birzeit University
- Posted in History of the Present
- Tagged Middle East Institute, Columbia University Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, The Windsor-Birzeit Dignity Initiative University of Windsor and Birzeit University, Birzeit University Political Conflict Gender and People's Rights Project, Center for Race and Gender University of California Berkeley, Richard Shapiro, Brinkley Messick, Rashid Khalidi, Mohamad Junaid, Cheran, Nadia Abu El-Haj, Abdul Rahim al-Shaikh, Angana P. Chatterji, Gil Anidjar, abd