Extended Deadline -- Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Arab Studies Journal on 'Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond'

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Extended Deadline -- Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Arab Studies Journal on "Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond"

By : ASJ Editors

DEADLINE EXTENDED -- April 30

Call for Papers for a Special Issue of the Arab Studies Journal on

"Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond"

Arab Studies Journal invites submissions analyzing contemporary and historical forms of popular cultural resistance on the topic of “Cultures of Resistance: The Case of Palestine and Beyond.” Papers should be between 6,500 and 10,000 words, double-spaced, including endnotes.

Mainstream literature on the Arab world has largely focused on formal politics and classic notions of civil society (such as high-level diplomacy, political parties, electoral systems, voting patterns, trade unions, and NGOs.). Scant attention has been devoted to the ways in which cultural production can function as crucial site of political expression, as well as for (re-)thinking identity formations, nationalisms, forms of power, and resistance. The central role that street art, music, forms of dressing and sartorial practices, religious and secular rituals, and popular songs have played in forging new political subjectivities and new political cultures during the recent uprisings in the Middle East indicates the extent to which such research into cultural forms of "doing politics" is timely and needed.

The case of Palestine takes center stage as a paradigm of contemporary forms of settler colonialism, and, historically, as a lively laboratory for different and changing cultures of resistance. Here at stake is the relation between resistance and cultural production in a context of ongoing occupation and simultaneously, of normalization. Resistance, as expressed in cultural production, has historically centered predominantly against Israeli occupation, but more recently it also increasingly targets different internal actors who are seen to be complicit in normalizing the occupation, such as the Palestinian Authority and other political elites. By looking at the “aesthetics” of politics, power and resistance, we would like to investigate whether and how cultural productions can spur the emergence of new political subjects and projects that can function as counter-publics, alternative and/or in opposition to hegemonic discourses, and what kinds of gender and generational shifts are under way in these processes. We also welcome analyses of other contexts within the Middle East and comparative studies elsewhere that are similarly characterized by occupation, conflict, resistance, revolutions, and uprisings.

Particular questions that this special issue will address include:

  • Are contemporary forms of art, cinema, literature, music, humor, or other forms of cultural production contributing to the emergence of new political projects, subjectivities, and expressions in Palestine and beyond? How do they compare to past forms of cultural resistance? Which lines do they continue, with which do they break?
  • How does the Palestinian case compare to cultures of resistance in other contexts? For example, what new insights can the study of cultural productions provide on the political dynamics of the recent uprisings in the Arab world?
  • How do notions of resistance, dissent, and solidarity circulate locally, regionally, and globally? Who are the agents (artists, producers, audiences, etc.) of cultures of resistance, and within which structures do they operate? More specifically, how, why, and by whom can political messages of dissent and resistance become appropriated, co-opted, and commodified?

Articles should be submitted to editor@arabstudiesjournal.org by 30 April 2013. Please follow the journal’s submission guidelines. If you would like to discuss your article before submission, please contact the special issue editors, Ruba Salih, ruba.salih@soas.ac.uk and Sophie Richter-Devroe, s.richter-devroe@exeter.ac.uk.

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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