CALL | Paper Abstracts for 'Reassessing the British Mandate in Palestine' Due 4/30/22

Don’t forget to submit your abstract by 30 April 2022.

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.

ATTEND | Race, Racism and Palestine Panel, CMES Brown University

 
 

TUESDAY
19 APR 2022
6:00-7:30pm ET

Palestinians have long developed a racial theory of Zionism. The Oslo Peace Process, initiated in the early 1990s, subsumed these theories and others that poignantly framed the Palestinian freedom struggle as one against settler colonization, into a peace and justice framework that eschewed the consequential dimension of power. The collapse of the Peace Process at the Camp David talks in 2000 and the Second Palestinian Intifada that followed created fertile grounds for Palestinian advocates and intellectuals to return to a racial and colonial analysis to describe their conditions of unfreedom. The 2014 Gaza-Ferguson moment, marking renewals of Black Palestinian transnational solidarity, catalyzed these analytical returns and acutely re-centered the questions of race, racism, and Palestine among analysts, activists, and scholars. This panel featuring leading scholars of race, law, colonialism, and political economy will take on some of these questions to address racial ideologies, Palestinian intellectual traditions, anti-Blackness, legacies of slavery in the Middle East, and sovereignty frameworks to undergird and advance these ongoing conversations.

Speakers
Noura Erakat, Rutgers University, NJ

Marc Lamont Hill, Temple University, PA

John Reynolds, Maynooth University, Ireland

Sherene Seikaly, University of California, Santa Barbara

Lana Tatour, University of South Wales, Australia

This event is organized by CMES, Brown University. For more info, click here.

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
REGISTER NOW
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
REGISTER NOW
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.

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.

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.