CPS is happy to announce that the 2018-19 Abu Lughod fellow is Nayrouz Abu Hatoum. Nayrouz obtained her PhD in Social Anthropology from York University, Toronto, where she currently is a Visiting Scholar working on theories in visual anthropology, urban politics, landscape, borders and state violence. Her research explores visual politics in Palestine and the Israeli state, and people’s place making and dwelling practices in a context of colonialism and military occupations. At CPS, she will be working on her book project titled “Visual Decolonization: Photography of Militarized Landscapes in Palestine.”
CPS Faculty Nora Akawi collaborated with the newly launched Palestine Open Maps, an open platform for map-based exploration and immersive storytelling. This alpha version of the platform allows users to navigate and search the historic map sheets, and to view basic data about present and erased localities.
CPS Co-Director Rashid Khalidi, one of the leading academics in the study of the 20th century Palestinian national movement, will receive the 5th WOCMES Award on Wednesday 18th of July 2018.
Every four years, coinciding with a new edition of the congress, WOCMES International Advisory Council highlights the prominent trajectory of an outstanding expert for his/her contribution to Middle Eastern Studies. In this occasion, the Council endorsed the candidacy of Dr. Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and one of the most brilliant scholars of our days.
Khalidi is the highest authority on interpretations of the Arab-Jewish and Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, and author of some of the most influential studies on the topic. His public role as a prominent voice of the Palestinian cause is globally recognized and valued. It is impossible to understand this region and its historical experiences without Khalidi’s works.
Salim Tamari, Editor of Jerusalem Quarterly and Professor of Sociology at Birzeit University, received the State of Palestine National Recognition Award for his collective body of work. Established by presidential decree, the award is the highest honor in the fields of literature, political science, and the arts. It was announced in conjunction with the annual Palestine International Book Fair, held by the Palestinian Ministry of Culture.
CPS Faculty and former Co-Director Rashid Khalidi writes for The Nation on Palestine seventy years after the Nakba.
“The natives are still there, unified by decades of occupation and colonization since 1967, and they are restless. Those Palestinians who have managed to remain in historical Palestine—in spite of the ceaseless efforts to dispossess them—continue to resist erasure. Outside of Palestine, an equal number remain profoundly attached to their homeland and to the right of return. The Palestinians have not forgotten, they have not gone away, and the memory of Palestine and its dismemberment has not been effaced. Indeed, wider international audiences are increasingly aware of these realities.”
The final Uprising 13/13 seminar will address how to think about counterrevolutions in relation to all the other modalities of revolt and resistance that we have studied this year (civil disobedience, #BLM, breaking silence, Standing Rock, etc.). How do we talk about the counterrevolutions as a distinct form of uprising?
With Malcolm Gladwell, author; Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia University; Laleh Khalili, Centre for Palestine Studies, SOAS, University of London; Massimiliano Tomba, University of California Santa Cruz.
Moderated by Jeremy Kessler and Emmanuelle Saada.
The seminar will be streamed live here; also posted now is a reading guide by Emily Gruber to The Counterrevolution. Essays "The Aftermath" by Laleh Khalili, "The Paris Commune and the Poetry of the Unknown" by Massimiliano Tomba, and "How Our Government Became Maoist: The Paradoxical Legacy of May '68" are all posted here in advance of the seminar.
April 26, 2018 from 6:15 p.m. to 8:45 p.m.
Riverside Church Assembly Hall
490 Riverside Drive New York, NY 10027
Mai Masri will screen her award-winning film 3000 Nights at the New School on Monday April 16 at 6:30pm. More details here, and RSVP here.
Selected to represent Jordan at the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and Palestine at the Golden Globes, 3000 Nights received its New York premiere at the Center for Palestine Studies in 2016.
3000 Nights tells the story of a newlywed Palestinian schoolteacher who is falsely arrested and incarcerated in an Israeli prison where she gives birth to her child. Inspired by a true story and shot in a real prison, the film traces a young mother's journey of hope, resilience and survival against all odds.
Palestine Museum US cordially invites you to our Grand Opening ceremony on April 22, 2018, from 1:00 - 5:00 PM at the museum venue in Woodbridge, Connecticut.
Please join us in marking the historic launch of the Palestine Museum US, the first permanent Palestinian museum in all of North and South America. The mission of the Museum is to celebrate Palestinian artistic and cultural expression, tell the Palestinian story to a worldwide audience, and promote the research and preservation of Palestinian history.
The Grand Opening ceremony will feature a reception with refreshments, followed by welcoming remarks by founder Faisal Saleh, a keynote speech by renowned artist Samia Halaby, literary readings, video screenings, and the dedication of the museum’s lobby mural to Rachel Corrie. A one-hour concert featuring two renowned Palestinian musicians—oud player Nizar Rohana, and violinist Layale Chaker—will take place in the galleries. Guests will be given a tour of the museum, and several artists will be present to discuss their work.
Due to space limitations, this event is by invitation only. Kindly respond by Friday, March 30, 2018 by emailing Faisal.Saleh@PalestineMuseum.US.
In 1948, Palestinian couple Said and Safiyya fled their home during the Nakba. Now, in the aftermath of the 1967 Six Day War, the borders are open for the first time in twenty years, and the couple dare to return back to their home in Haifa. They expect to find someone else living in their former home, yet nothing prepares them for what they find in its place.
The production coincides with the 70th anniversaries of both the Nakba – the mass dispossession of the Palestinians in 1948 – and the foundation of the State of Israel. Originally commissioned by New York’s Public Theater, Returning to Haifa was cancelled after political pressure. It will now receive its world premiere at London’s Finborough Theatre on 27 February, where it will run until 24 March.
Here American playwright Naomi Wallace and Beirut-born writer Ismail Khalidi talk about adapting the novel for the stage.
Friday, Feb 23, 2018 at 10:00 am
219 Aaron Burr Hall, Princeton University
Speakers:
Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University
Julia Elyachar, Princeton University
Didier Fassin, Institute for Advanced Study
Lynn Meskell, Stanford University
Directed by Mohammed Al-Azza & Amahl Bishara.
Amahl and Mohammad are both Palestinian, but Mohammad is a refugee born in the West Bank, while Amahl holds an Israeli passport and was born in the US. When Amahl went to a protest for refugee rights in Israel and saw there many of Mohammad’s American and European colleagues, she called him in frustration that he could not be there because of Israel’s movement restrictions. He replied with a generous provocation: “Why don’t you take pictures for me?” From there begins an exchange of photographs and a set of video explorations about expression, mobility, Palestinian collectivity, and the limits of what one friend can do for another.
Post-screening discussion with Amahl Bishara and Zachary Lockman (History and Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, NYU)
CPS Faculty Lila Abu-Lughod delivers the 2018 Clifford Geertz Commemorative Lecture at Princeton University.
Following in Geertz’ footsteps by thinking comparatively, Abu-Lughod will reflect on Palestine’s apparent political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples. This reflection is inspired specifically by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies about settler colonialism in places like Australia and North America. And now Palestine. New imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination are emerging in indigenous activism, whether enabled by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People or the politics of refusal of liberal “recognition.” The journey goes to a variety of museums and ritual spaces of recognition and ends with questions about how to judge the efflorescence of recent Palestinian cultural projects like the new Palestinian Museum. The infatuation with the framework of settler colonialism in Palestinian studies is, however contested and even problematic, productive precisely because of the way it generates comparisons and solidarities that burst open exhausted political imaginations and bring together the political, material, and moral.
Dr. Abed Kanaaneh joins the the Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies at Columbia as a visiting scholar. He recently completed an award winning dissertation "Hizballah in Lebanon: Al-Muqawamah (Resistance) as a Contra-Hegemonic Project” at Tel Aviv University. His research interests include: Shiite political thought, radical Islamic movements, revolutionary thought in the Middle East, the Arab-Israeli Conflict, and new Marxism in the Middle East.
Abed was previously the co-director of the Equality Policy Department at Sikkuy—The Association for the Advancement of Civic Equality in Israel. He also headed communist member of parliament Dov Khenin’s staff and was the spokesperson of the Arab Center for Alternative Planning.
CPS Faculty Rhoda Kanaaneh is teaching the course "The Anthropology of Palestine" in the Spring 2018 term.
This course examines the relationship between different forms of knowledge about Palestinians and the political and social history of the region. It explores the complex interplay of state, ethnicity, gender, sexuality and class at both local and global levels in constructing what Palestine is and who Palestinians are. The course takes up diverse areas, from graphic novels to archaeological sites, from news reporting to hiking trails, to study how Palestine is created and recreated. Students will gain a familiarity with anthropological concepts and methodological approaches to Palestine. They will become familiar with aspects of the social organization, historical developments, and political events that have shaped the region over the last century. The course is also intended to develop students’ skills in written and oral communication, analysis, ethnographic observation, and critical thinking.
The Center for Palestine Studies and the Open University Project at Columbia Law School are pleased to announce the Spring 2018 Reading Group: The Law of Occupation – Palestine/Israel, facilitated by CPS faculty Katherine Franke.
This reading group will explore the legal, political and moral underpinnings and consequences of occupation, and will examine how international law defines and regulates occupation, and differentiates legal from illegal occupation and colonialism. The group will meet six times during the spring semester for 2 hours each session.
All interested members of the Columbia community are invited to email cpspalestine@gmail.com.
The Middle East Institute is pleased to welcome Anaheed Al-Hardan to Columbia University as the Arcapita Visiting Professor for the Spring 2018 semester. Anaheed Al-Hardan comes from the American University of Beirut where she is an Assistant Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology and Media Studies. She is the author of the award-winning Palestinians in Syria: Nakba Memories of Shattered Communities (Columbia University Press, 2016), joint winner of the 2016 Academic Book Award at the London Palestine Book Awards.
