Kalimat Magazine Launches the Winter 2012 Egyptian Design Issue

[Map of Arab World. Image from Kalimat Magazine] [Map of Arab World. Image from Kalimat Magazine]

Kalimat Magazine Launches the Winter 2012 Egyptian Design Issue

By : Jadaliyya Reports

NEW YORK, December 21, 2011 – Arab thought and culture quarterly magazine Kalimat has launched their fourth issue for Winter 2012. Kalimat is an intermedia company that features bold and engaging political analysis, design, film, fashion, music, cultural affairs and new media content.

The Winter issue covers Kalimat`s four dossiers: Current Affairs, Culture, Art and Design and New Media. The 152-page (cover-to-cover) issue is Kalimat’s Egyptian Design Issue. Readers can look forward to refreshing features that focus on the design landscape in Egypt today, are experimental in content and varied in interest. Articles include conversations with leading Egyptian and international designers such as Shahira Fahmy, Karim Mekhtigian, Christophe Pillet, Francesco Rota, Mohamed Fares, Mona Hussein, Dina El Khachab and Cherif Morsi,  a feature on conserving Egypt’s ancient history in its urban centre, and a look at Tahrir through The Politician, a film directed by Amr Salama, which is comic exposé of Hosni Mubarak, questioning what it takes to be a dictator and cartoonishly studying his hair-dying ritual to expose his superficiality. 

Kalimat remains a platform for for Arab cultural creatives to engage in thought and action around ideas, people and business moving the world forward. Of note is a discussion of the emergence of Libya’s revolutionary rap and hip hop scene, a look at the Arab world’s transportation system, and an opinion piece on non-traditional sexual arrangements. Infographics throughout the issue highlight the value of communication through data visualisation.

Kalimat also features a podcast, Isma3oo No. 4, which features features a talk by our Creative Director and Editor from the “Artistic Arabs in America” event in Washington, DC on issues arising from the intersection of education and cultural production (particularly in the Arab region); an exploration and commentary of issues of nostalgia, technology, and what was lost and gained through recent developments with Arab music; a song by an artist featured in the issue; and a sneak preview of an upcoming project by Kalimat (which promises to be a lot of fun). The Isma3oo podcast is accessible in many ways, through iTunes, SoundCloud, or on our website.

Kalimat Magazine, Issue 04, Winter 2011, is available online at www.kalimatmagazine.com.

About Kalimat Magazine

Kalimat Magazine is committed to rejuvenating Arabic culture by providing an outlet for political, cultural and social expression within the Arab region and its Diaspora. At the same time, it is a visual communication tool that serves to change prevalent perception of Arabs. The purpose is to be an open outlet for expression and to increase participation within the cultural/creative scene, providing a platform for Arab cultural creatives to engage in thought and action around ideas, people and business moving the world forward. Therefore, the content is created by Arab people, the writers are Arab, the editors are Arab, the people featured are Arab.

Web: www.kalimatmagazine.com  | Twitter: @kalimatkalimat | Facebook: Facebook.com/KalimatMagazine | Monthly newsletter and communiqués |


For further information:

Rawan Hadid
Communications + Public Relations | Kalimat Magazine |

rawanhadid@kalimatmagazine.com | +1.646.541.2961 |

www.kalimatmagazine.com |  http://www.twitter.com/kalimatkalimat

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[Image from Kalimat Magazine]

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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