A talk with Leila Farsakh, Chair and Associate Professor of Political Science, College of Liberal Arts, UMass Boston.
Introduced by Gil Anidjar, Professor and Chair of Department of Religion, Columbia University.

This talk re-examines the extent to which the struggle for a Palestinian state was a viable or futile effort for the Palestinian national movement and as a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Do the notion of partition and the claim to a State constitute the only vehicles for any national group, be it Israelis or Palestinians, to have “the right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt argued? Can the quest for self-determination be protected otherwise, especially in view of present regional and International developments?

This talk reflects on a decade of research, contingent, accidental, and unconsciously autobiographical, to explore archival practices and the writing of history. It recounts my experience of stumbling across family papers that carried the story of Naim Cotran as a “man of capital.” I detail Naim’s consumerism, his financial investments and property, and his land dispute with his brother, and then trace his experience of dispossession after the Nakba as a refugee in Lebanon. What happened to a man of capital who survived the catastrophe of 1948? What allows an archive to survive that event? What stories does it record and what does it render invisible?