ATTEND | Music Against Empire on 9/8/23

Music Against Empire: Contemporary and Historical Excavations of Trauma and Resistance

Convenors: Ege Yumusak (Philosophy/SOF) and Knar Abrahamyan (Music)

Sound continues to act as a form of resistance to systemic oppression in contemporary classical, improvised and even popular music. While recording technology and conditions of war have posed great limitations, we also have access to music made by historical victims—such as victims of war. Join us for a performance and conversation about music against empire. Led by Knar Abrahamyan, our panelists will engage with historical and contemporary musical sources that foreground resistance to erasure, oppression, and cultural assimilation. How can sonic practices effectuate the emergence of collective memory in the face of trauma? In what ways have song and poetry manifested notions of belonging? How can listening as a form of solidarity factor into forging resilience?

Knar Abrahamyan (Music) will lead a discussion with Jill Jarvis (Yale) and Hiba Abid (NYPL), following a musical presentation by Layale Chaker’s Sarafand Ensemble.

This event is organized by The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities and cosponsored by Columbia Maison Français and the Department of Music. For more info, click here.

ATTEND | Book launch for The Cunning of Gender Violence on 9/13/23

Join us in celebrating the publication of The Cunning of Gender Violence, edited by Lila Abu-Lughod, Rema Hammami and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

The volume focuses on how a once visionary feminist project has folded itself into contemporary world affairs. Combating violence against women and gender-based violence constitutes a highly visible and powerful agenda enshrined in international governance and law and embedded in state violence and global securitization. Case studies on Palestine, Bangladesh, Iran, India, Pakistan, Israel, and Turkey as well as on UN and US policies trace the silences and omissions, along with the experiences of those subjected to violence, to question the rhetoric that claims the agenda as a “feminist success story.” Read more. 

The Center for the Study of Social Difference will host a panel on September 13 with contributors to the volume, including Lila Abu-Lughod and Rema Hammami. 

For more info about the launch event, click here. 

CONGRATS | Alessandra Amin: ANDREW W. MELLON POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW IN THE HUMANITIES 2023-24

The Center for Palestine Studies congratulates Alessandra Amin on her appointment as an Andrew Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania!

Alessandra Amin is a historian of modern art in the Arab world, specializing in Palestinian painting and graphic arts during the second half of the twentieth century. Her work explores the aesthetic and philosophical currents mediating artists’ relationships to Palestine across chasms of space, time, and catastrophe, paying particular attention to the gendered dimensions of Palestinian futurities. Her research has been supported by the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University, the Social Science Research Council, the Palestinian American Research Center, Darat al-Funun, and the U.S. Department of Education. Her writing has appeared in Trans Asia Photography, MAVCOR Journal, and Art Journal, and is forthcoming in ARTMargins. At Penn, she will continue working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State.

Alessandra was previously the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod 2022 - 2023 Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Palestine Studies.

Read more here.

READ | Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba by Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

The Center congratulates Areej Sabbagh-Khoury on the publication of her new book, Colonizing Palestine: The Zionist Left and the Making of the Palestinian Nakba, available now from Stanford University Press. Areej is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was one of our first Ibrahim Abu-Lughod postdoctoral fellows in 2015.

ABOUT
Among the most progressive of Zionist settlement movements, Hashomer Hatzair proclaimed a brotherly stance on Zionist-Palestinian relations. Until the tumultuous end of the British Mandate, movement settlers voiced support for a binational Jewish-Arab state and officially opposed mass displacement of Palestinians. But, Hashomer Hatzair colonies were also active participants in the process that ultimately transformed large portions of Palestine into sovereign Jewish territory. Areej Sabbagh-Khoury investigates this ostensible dissonance, tracing how three colonies gained control of land and their engagement with Palestinian inhabitants on the edges of the Jezreel Valley/Marj Ibn 'Amer.
Read more.

NEWS | Brian Boyd participates in "Returning to Shuqba" workshop at Birzeit University

Brian Boyd, Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies, participated in "Returning to Shuqba: community archaeology, museum anthropology and oral history," a workshop held at Birzeit University on June 5, 2023.

Brian is carrying out fieldwork related to his project Building Community Anthropology Across the Jordan Valley in Shuqba cave this summer. The project is funded by the Columbia University President’s Global Innovation Fund and is co-developed and co-led with Hamed Salem (Birzeit University).

Building Community Anthropology Across the Jordan Valley is a community-based museological and anthropological research and teaching project focused on the town and surrounding landscape of Shuqba in the Palestinian Territories. The overall aim of the project is to contribute to the creation of sustainable cultural heritage and tourism-related collaborations between local communities, the Palestinian diaspora, and local, regional and international institutions (ranging across academic, governmental and NGOs).

CALL | Impossible Ethnographies; Notes on Israel’s Blockade of Palestinian Anthropology

Insaniyyat is soliciting reflections from researchers who have had projects interrupted, prevented, or simply made inconceivable due to Israel's restrictions on Palestinian movement. Closure and visa policies have wide implications for where and what is studied in the Anthropology of Palestine, who can conduct that research, and what is researchable. We are interested in contributions that demonstrate the material effects on scholars' research agendas and on the very possibility of undertaking research in Palestine. We ask that interested authors send us either a short abstract 250-300 words, or a longer narrative piece under the title "Impossible Ethnographies." Images are also welcome. Please share the call for contributions and submission form among any potentially interested authors. 

READ | "Palestinians in Paraguay" by Hadeel Assali in LRB

“In​ 2005, I travelled from the US to visit relatives in Palestine, but my trip was cut short when the Israelis denied me entry to Gaza. I tried again the following year. This time I was detained at the Erez crossing and held in a gated area for around twelve hours. I conceded defeat and set off via the West Bank to Jordan, from where I was to fly back to the US. My mother suggested I should take advantage of the stopover in Jordan to meet my great-uncle Mahmoud. All she knew about him was that he had spent several years in South America. He now lived near the Coca-Cola bottling factory in the industrial suburbs of Amman. As my taxi pulled up, he was waiting in the street: tall, friendly, in his mid-fifties. He showed me into his flat to meet his family – he had four children, teenagers at the time. I asked him why he’d been in South America. He said he’d been ‘messed around’. Perhaps he was hoping to leave it there, but I was inquisitive, and it wasn’t long before he told me that he had been involved in an ethnic cleansing experiment dreamed up by the Israelis after the 1967 war, intended to remove as many Palestinians as possible from the newly occupied territories.”

Published in the London Review of Books, Vol. 45 No. 10 · 18 May 2023.

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Hadeel Assali is a postdoctoral scholar at Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society. She holds a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia University.

APPLY | Edward W. Said Fellowships at the SOF/Heyman Center

Edward Said was one of the most influential intellectuals of his time. By both temperament and conviction a thorough cosmopolitan, Said was instrumental in expanding the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century, often crossing and sometimes redefining disciplinary borders. His restless, probing examination of the relationship between culture and politics is the hallmark of his work.

Eligibility Early Career Scholars with Interest in Said's Archives

Status 2024 Application Period Open DUE: July 15, 2023