Conference: Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Graduate Student Conference (New York, 27-28 February 2014)

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Feb 20, 2014
Conference: Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Graduate Student Conference (New York, 27-28 February 2014)

Conference: Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Graduate Student Conference (New York, 27-28 February 2014)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies Graduate Student Conference

New York, 27-28 February 2014

Knox Hall, Columbia University
606 West 122nd Street

Presented by the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies
Columbia University


Thursday 27 February

8.30 - 9.30 am: Registration (Knox Lobby) and Light Breakfast (Knox 207 and 208)

9.30 - 10.30 am: Welcome Remarks (Matan Cohen) and Plenary Address (Sudipta Kaviraj) - Knox 208

SESSION 1: 10.45 am - 12.45 pm

Scanning the Shelves of the African Islamic Library - Knox 207

  • Wendell Marsh, Reading Sudanic Africa in the Margins: the Perils of Commentary
  • Kimberly Wortmann, Intellectual Cartographies in the Medieval Western Sahel (c. 1464-1627)
  • Ariela Marcus-Sells, Spells and Prayers: Discussing Muslim Practice in Saharan Society
  • Lori De Lucia, On the Edges of Mediterranean History: Finding Evidence for Sub-Saharan African Narratives in the 16th Century Kingdom of Naples
  • Discussant: Mamadou Diouf
  • Moderator: Tommaso Manfredini

 
Narrating Progress - Knox 208

  • Bader al-Saif, Surveying Thaqafat al-Takhalluf in Modern & Contemporary Arabic Literature: an Intellectual Historiography
  • Taylor Moore, "Superstitious Women": Cultivating the Upper Egyptian Fellaha in SemiColonial Egypt
  • Andrew Stedman Alger, Religious Education and Revolution in Hashemite Iraq
  • Yasmine Djerbal, Gender, Nation and Postcolonial Contexts: An Algerian Experience
  • Discussant: Sudipta Kaviraj
  • Moderator: Sohini Pillai

 

1 - 1.45 pm: Lunch - Knox 207 & 208


SESSION 2: 2 -4 PM

Islam, Modernity and Political Form: The Impossible State - Knox 207

  • Hasan Azad, "The Islamic State is Not a Dream": Hizb ut-Tahrir’s Thinking Through the Modern State
  • Kamal Soleimani, Islamist Arab Nationalism: The Arab-Centrism of Islamic Political Thought between the late 19th and Early 20th Centuries
  • Yuenmei Wong, Shari’a-Queers: Islamic Law and the Construction of New Muslims’ Sexual Identities in Malaysia
  • Discussant: Wael Hallaq
  • Moderator: Neda Bolourchi

 
Locating Culture - Knox 208

  • Mina Khanlarzadeh, Lalehzari Music: Unsung Artists of Iranian Song
  • Salha Reema Fadda, The Political Economy of Cultural Intervention in Palestine
  • Katie Logan, Google It: Virtual Maps and the Anxieties of Forgetting in Modern Arabic Literature
  • Discussant: Muhsin al-Musawi
  • Moderator: Sarah Hawas


Racialized Cartographies - Knox 403

  • Vishal Kamath, Hybridity and Spatial Imagination in the Persian Gulf: Locating the Banu Ka’b Arabs from 1707 to 1775
  • Pascal Missak Abidor, Genealogy of a Geography: Jabal Amiil between `Asabiya and Wataniya
  • Owain Lawson, “History is Merely a Bird of Passage”: Environmental Determinism, Racialization, and  Nationalism in Mandate Lebanon
  • Andrea Daniel Rosengarten, Other "Coloureds": Categorization and Identity of Colonial Namibia`s Mixed-Race Communities, 1914-1939
  • Moderator: Andrew Ollett

 

SESSION 3: 4.15 - 6.15 PM

Education, Knowledge, and Modernity - Knox 207

  • Salmaan Mirza, Preaching Business Education
  • Kenan Tekin, Knowledge and Social Imaginary in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire: Sacaklizade and Yahya Nevi’s Organization of Disciplines
  • Shaadi Khoury, Al-Hilal`s Survey of 1919-1920 and the Nahda`s Contentious Language Debate
  • Discussant: Linda Sayed
  • Moderator: Casey Primel


Humor and Re-Appropriation in Palestinian and Hebrew Literatures - Knox 208

  • Danielle Drori, What`s Funny about Mistranslation?: The First Translation of Don-Quixote into Hebrew
  • Liron Mor, What`s Funny about Occupation?: Re-appropriations in Imil Habibi`s Pessopsimist
  • Discussant: Dan Miron
  • Moderator: Roni Henig


Islamic Reform in Modern Thought and Politics - Knox 403

  • Jacob Olidort, The Mosque as Message: Albani and the Politicization of Piety in 1950`s Damascus
  • Ayse Betul Tekin, Muhammad Abduh’s Approach to Religion: Between Tradition and Modernity
  • Zahra Sabri, Citizen Khan and the Face of Non-‘fundamentalist’ Islam in Pakistan today
  • Discussant: Hossein Kamaly
  • Moderator: Angela Giordani

 
7 pm:  Dinner - Location TBA

 

Friday 28 February

8.30 - 9.30 am: Registration (Knox Lobby) & Light Breakfast (Knox 207 & 208)


SESSION 4: 9.15 - 11.15 AM

Colonizing Strategies - Knox 207

  • Abhijit Sarkar, The State in the Kitchen: State-Intervention in Food and Popular Responses in Wartime India (1939-45)
  • Oscar Jarzmik, "Adjusting to Powerlessness" in Occupied Jerusalem: Ethnopsychiatry and the Organizing Principles of Municipal Policy after the June 1967 War
  • Hashim Bin Rashid, Enclosing the River Indus
  • Noa Shaindlinger, Point of No Return
  • Discussant: Michael Griffiths
  • Moderator: Matan Cohen


Classical Islam: Ethics, Language and Epistemology - Knox 403

  • Osman Yilmaz, A Dating of al-Suyûtî’s Grammatical Khilâf Book
  • Antonia Sigrid Bosanquet, The Polemics of Here and There: Place, Space and Telling in Aḥkām Ahl al-Dhimma
  • Giovanni Carrera, The Epistemological Role of Language in al-Rāzī`s hermeneutics
  • Discussant: Katharina Ivanyi
  • Moderator: Sohaib Khan

 

SESSION 5: 11.30 AM - 1.30 PM

Regimes of Labor - Knox 403

  • Claudie Fioroni, From “Politics of Work” to “Politics at Work”: An Analysis of Subjection Processes at the Jordan Phosphate Mine Company
  • Cihan Tekay, The State, Global Capital and Women Workers in Turkey: A Case Study of the 2006-2007 Novamed Strike
  • Matan Kaminer, The Wages of Agricultural Work in Israel
  • Li Xiaoyue, Illness as Discourse-Medical Representations of Worker`s Diseases
  • Discussant: Timothy Mitchell
  • Moderator: Matthew Ghazarian


Visual Politics - Knox 207

  • Hira Nabi, Between Islam and Cinema in Pakistan: Spectacle and Jaloos
  • Taylor Zajicek, Capturing Turkish-Soviet Convergence on Film
  • Nour K Sacranie, Alternative Remembrances: Memory, History and the Civil War in Contemporary Lebanese Art
  • Anna Dowell, Of Bodies and Buildings: Reading Claims to Citizenship and Grievability in Images of Violence
  • Discussant: TBA
  • Moderator: Farbod Honarpisheh


Rethinking the Political - Knox 208

  • Ahmed Dardir, Martyr Genealogies: The Practice of al Khawarij and Umm al Mu`minin as Subjugated Knowledge
  • Matan Cohen, Disengaged Lives: Palestine and the Question of Vulnerability
  • Anna-Esther Younes, The New Europe and the Figure of the Jew
  • Marianna Reis, Strategies of Legitimization: Deploying Palestinians as Israeli Arab Agents of the Zionist State
  • Discussant: Judith Butler
  • Moderator: Nasser Abourahme


1.30 - 3.30 pm: Lunch - Knox 207 & 208


SESSION 6: 3.30 - 5.30 PM

Islamic Law and Jurisprudence - Knox 207

  • Rahile Yilmaz, Criticizing Muslim Traditions: A Critical Analysis of Muslim and Western Academic Approaches to the Study of Ḥadīth
  • Mohammad Syifa Amin Widigdo, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī on Jadal: Theological-Juridical Dialectic in the Eleventh Century Nishapur
  • Omar Farahat, Divine Command Ethics in the Jurisprudence of Abū Bakr b. al-Bāqillānī
  • Sohaib Khan, Efficiency Matters: Virtues of Maximization and the Moral Failings of Islamic Banking and Finance
  • Discussant: TBA
  • Moderator: Omar Farahat

 

Modern Ottoman History: Urban Politics and Regional Growth - Knox 208

  • Koca Mehmet Kentel, Cosmopolitanism over Dead Bodies: Subway, Cemetery, Garden and Urban Dualities in the Late 19th Century Istanbul
  • Jeffery Dyer, The Growth of an Ottoman Consular Network in the Indian Ocean, 1849-1914
  • Baris Tasyakan, The Politics of Fire: Ottoman Istanbul in the Late Eighteenth Century
  • Nora Cherishian Lessersohn, ‘Provincial Cosmopolitanism’ in Late Ottoman Anatolia: Recovering Armenian Complexity through Hovhannes Cherishian’s (1886-1967) Memoir
  • Discussant: Christine Philiou
  • Moderator: Kenan Tekin

 

Medieval Arts and Sciences - Knox 403

  • Owen Cornwall, Alexander and the Astrolabe in India
  • Naveen Kanalu, Mārga/ Desi or the ‘Path’ and the ‘Country’ in Vernacularization: The Shaping of Pre-modern Kannada Literary Culture
  • Marcela Schlueter, To the Letter: Examining Paratextuality and Pedagogy in the Letters of Abū’l Qāsim al-Junayd, Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī, and Niẓāmuddīn Auliyā
  • Discussant: Mana Kia
  • Moderator: Kyle Schirmann


6 - 7 pm: Keynote Session - 501 Schermerhorn

  • Introduction: Wendell Marsh.
  • Keynote Address: Ruth Marshall, “Global” Christianity in the Postcolony: Reflections on the Politics of Knowledge


7.30 pm: Dinner
Location TBA

 

 

  

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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