Conference--Spaces, Scales, Routes: Region Formation in History and Anthropology (1-2 May, Cambridge, MA)

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Apr 1, 2015
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Conference--Spaces, Scales, Routes: Region Formation in History and Anthropology (1-2 May, Cambridge, MA)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

In recent years, various regions have drawn growing interest in scholarly and popular debates. Clandestine migration overflows national borders along routes that often follow historical connections. Regionalist projects draw on pre-national pasts as they attempt to create supra-national political and economic formations. Infrastructural projects like pipelines, offshore mineral exploitation, highways, and telecommunication cables bind places and articulate stakes in ways that both re-imagine the past and reconfigure the future on a vast scale. Yet, most academic analysis of these trends oscillate between local, national, and global scales of analysis. This conference seeks to examine the spaces, scales and routes of such dynamics by promoting a comparative approach to region formation.

What distinguishes the current regionalism from the earlier area studies? What has given the idea of the region new traction, what is it contrasted with, what kinds of projects does it underwrite, and through what processes is a regional space materialized? This interdisciplinary conference will address these questions by examining the region, not as a pre-given scale of social life, but as a product of both “expert” classification and of social practice. We will inquire what analytical purchase the idea of the region has had, what scholars are responding to by elevating the region analytically, and what spatial practices they showcase as constitutive of region formation.

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Preliminary Program

Friday May 1, 2015

9:00-11:00          Session 1: Representing Regions 

Chair: Yael Berda, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University 

“Crossing the Line: Rituals and Realities of Life and Death in the Contemporary Mediterranean” | Lanfranco Aceti, Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Digital Culture, Sabanci University & Özden Şahin, PhD Candidate in Media and Communications, Goldsmiths College—University of London

“Maritime Governance as Transnational Assemblage: Mapping States and Surveilling Seas in the Western Gulf of Guinea”  | Brenda Chalfin, Professor of Anthropology, University of Florida

“The Friction of Geography across the Trans-Arabian Pipeline” |  Rania Ghosn, Assistant Professor of Architecture and Planning, MIT

“Contemplating Distances” |  Gina Athena Ulysse, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Wesleyan University

Discussant: Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University

11:00-11:20        Coffee Break

11:20-13:20        Session II: Mobility and Immobility in Region Formation

Chair: Caroline Schuster, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,  Australian National University

“Magical Mobilities in the Shadow of Sovereignty: The Secret Geographies of the Haitian Caribbean” | Jeffrey Kahn, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University 

“The Relative Location of Knots: an exploration of the entanglement of spaces, scales and routes” | Sarah Green , Professor of Anthropology, University of Helsinki

“Partisans and Partitions: War and Mobility at the Ends of Empire” | Darryl Li,  Associate Research Scholar in Law & Robina Visiting Human Rights Fellow, Yale Law School

“Golden Shoes, Tobacco Seats: Sanctions and Transactions across the Iran-Turkey Border” | Emrah Yildiz, Joint PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

Discussant: Engseng Ho, Professor of Anthropology and History, Duke University                             

13:20-15:00        Lunch (for participants only)

15:00-17:00        Session III: Scaling States in Region Formation                      

Chair: Jeffrey Kahn, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University

“The Mediterranean from Image to Drama: Recipe for an Historical Anthropology of Region Formation” | Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University

“Encounters at Sea: The Borders of Piracy in the Western Indian Ocean” | Jatin Dua, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, University of Michigan

“The Unmaking of Empire: Transnational Legal Space in East Asia” | Yukiko Koga, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, CUNY-Hunter College & Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University

“In search of the shadow fleet: Paraguay’s mau cars and the politics of bottlenecks across the triple-frontier” | Caroline Schuster, Assistant Professor of Anthropology,  Australian National University

Discussant: Andrew Shryock , Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of  Anthropology, University of Michigan              

18:30                 Dinner: Location TBA (for participants only)

Saturday May 2, 2015

9:30-11:30          Session IV:  Value and Circulation in Region Formation

Chair:  Yukiko Koga, Assistant Professor of Anthropology, CUNY-Hunter College & Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University  

“’Hoovering up the Real Stuff:’ How perceptions of demand for physical gold shape some U.S. and European ideas of Asia | Elizabeth Ferry, Professor of Anthropology, Brandeis University

“Circulation and containment: region formation in the Sahara” |  Judith Scheele, Post-doctoral Research Fellow, All Souls College-University of Oxford

“Translating Insurance: Capital and Economic Thought” |  Sherene Seikaly,  Assistant Professor of History, University of California—Santa Barbara

“Swadeshi Spaces / Sovereign Spaces: Scale and Time in the Indian Economic Imaginary” | Benjamin Siegel, Assistant Professor of History, Boston University

Discussant: Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies, Harvard University 

11:30-11:50        Coffee Break

11:50-13:50        Session V: Temporality and Spatiality in Political Imagination

Chair: Darryl Li, Associate Research Scholar in Law & Robina Visiting Human Rights Fellow, Yale Law School

“Love Curriculum, Passion Infrastructure in Sissi’s Egypt: Re-Mapping the Moral and Material Circuits of Governance in a Neo-authoritarian Age” |  Paul Amar,  Associate Professor of Global and International Studies, University of California—Santa Barbara

“Crisis Economics”: Keynes and the End of Empire | Manu Goswami, Associate Professor of History, New York University   

“The Uninhabitable? : An essay on regions” |  AbdouMaliq Simone, Visiting Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths College—University of London

“Vast Area, Sparse People: The Black River Region in Indochina and Vietnam”|  Christian Lentz, Assistant Professor of Geography, University of North Carolina—Chapel Hill

Discussant: Laurent Dubois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History, Duke University                

13:50-15:30        Lunch (for participants only)

15:30-17:30        Discussants’ Roundtable: Concluding Remarks

Vincent Brown, Charles Warren Professor of History and of African and African American Studies, Harvard University  

Laurent Dubois, Marcello Lotti Professor of Romance Studies and History, Duke University  

Engseng Ho, Professor of Anthropology and History, Duke University         

Andrew Shyrock, Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of  Anthropology, University of Michigan                   

Ajantha Subramanian, Professor of Anthropology and of South Asian Studies, Harvard University     

Moderators:  Naor Ben-Yehoyada, Harvard Academy Scholar, Harvard University

 & Emrah Yildiz, Joint PhD Candidate in Anthropology and Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University

18:00                 Dinner: Location TBA  (for participants only)
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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