Call for Papers: Arab Cities Revisited: Interdisciplinary Itineraries (13 February 2018)

Call for Papers: Arab Cities Revisited: Interdisciplinary Itineraries (13 February 2018)

Call for Papers: Arab Cities Revisited: Interdisciplinary Itineraries (13 February 2018)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Middle East Studies Association Annual Meeting
November 15–18, 2018  --  San Antonio, TX

Organizers: Najib Hourani (Michigan State University) and Laurie King (Georgetown University )

Arab cities today are undergoing rapid transformations with the rise and intensification of capitalist globalization.  While the securitized cityscape of Dubai has become emblematic of contemporary trends, cities as diverse as Amman, Beirut, Damascus, Cairo, Rabat, and Tunis also scramble for position in what urban elites believe to be an emerging hierarchy of global cities. Accordingly, and often at the urging of international institutions such as the World Bank and United Nations, Arab cities and the lives of their inhabitants are transformed through the privatization of government services, the liberalization of property regimes, the implementation of large-scale redevelopment projects, and the production of tourism-driven heritage preservation zones, all in the name of attracting increasingly fickle flows of capital. So, too, do Arab peoples reap what marketization sows: increased poverty, population displacement, authoritarian control, and political economies dominated by local, regional and global finance, insurance, and real estate interests. In the most extreme instances, Arab cities are experiencing either the birth of stand-alone urban mega-projects on the one hand, or the onset of globalized civil war and urbicide, on the other.  Despite the intensity of these dynamics, the Arab cities remain, to paraphrase Robinson (2002), off of Urban Studies and interdisciplinary maps. This panel seeks papers that do not simply apply existing frameworks to the understanding of Arab cities, but also utilize the lessons Arab cities present, to transform existing theorizations.

More than ever, fine-grained, holistic and historically grounded approaches are needed to make sense of the challenges that city-dwellers face in the Arab world. Through concrete case studies and ethnographies, authors are asked to attend to the discourses, structures, institutions, technologies, and strategies introduced, the problems they were meant to address, and the politico-economic forces that benefited from, resisted, or were produced by them.

We are particularly interested in papers that focus on the following issues:

-War’s impact on cities in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, and Libya.
-The political economy of urban reconstruction and heritage preservation in post-war cities.
-Contested spaces, identities, and meanings in the city.
-Political economies of structural adjustment and privatization: Who “owns” the city?
-Youth culture, gender, fashion and subaltern movements in Arab cities.
-Climate change and Arab Cities: Ecology, economy, and sustainability; public health.
-Applied research: how can qualitative scholarship on Arab cities inform just approaches to a growing refugee crisis?
-America’s Arab City: Dearborn.
-Migration and Diaspora communities: Arab spaces and city-making in Paris, Amsterdam, Stockholm, and Frankfurt.
-We are also interested in papers on Palestinian cities, Jerusalem first and foremost, but also Nazareth, Jaffa, Haifa, as well as the urban experiences of Palestinian refugee communities in cities such as Beirut and Damascus. 

Deadline for proposals: 13 February 2018

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412