Seminaire doctoral: Societes urbaines mediteraneennes: Histoire et anthropologie

Seminaire doctoral: Societes urbaines mediteraneennes: Histoire et anthropologie

Seminaire doctoral: Societes urbaines mediteraneennes: Histoire et anthropologie

By : Jadaliyya Reports

L’Institut interdisciplinaire d’anthropologie du contemporain/Laboratoire d’anthropologie urbaine (IIAC/LAU) et le Centre de recherche Europes-Eurasie de l’Institut nationale des langues et civilisations orientales, avec le soutien de l’ED 265 Langues, littératures et sociétés du monde de l’INALCO, organise ce séminaire mensuel, qui est un lieu de formation et d’échange pour les chercheurs et les étudiants en Master et Doctorat. Il vise à contribuer à la réflexion sur les notions et les pratiques d’urbanité et de citadinité dans le contexte des villes méditerranéennes en plaçant au cœur de l’analyse les différentes formes de cosmopolitisme, de patrimonialisation, d’identification et de territorialisation qui définissent ces sociétés urbaines. Le qualificatif de méditerranéen ne postule pas l’existence d’une quelconque "aire culturelle" aux contours bien délimités. Il permet de souligner une perspective historique marquée par les héritages de l’empire ottoman et de l’expansion coloniale européenne sur la rive sud de la Méditerranée. Il invite aussi à s’interroger sur les relations entre aire culturelle et formes d’urbanité.

Le programme de cette année sera consacré à la question du visible et de l`invisible dans la ville en tant que ce qui est montré ou caché, ce qui est considéré comme intime ou public, est un critère comparatif des urbanités.

Responsables :

Fréquence, horaire : mensuel, le 1er lundi du mois (sauf exception), à partir de novembre 2015, de 17h00 à 19h00
Lieu : INALCO, 65 rue des Grands Moulins, 75013 Paris, métro Bibliothèque François Mitterrand. Salle 3.15.

Programme 2015-2016

Lundi 2 novembre 2015, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15

Introduction : Les faces cachées des villes
Méropi ANASTASSIADOU, CREE/INALCO et Timour MUHIDINE, CERMOM/INALCO
Encore ou assez ? Les migrants entre humanité et déshumanisation
Hakan GÜNDAY, Istanbul

Lundi 7 décembre 2015, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Récits d`une ville oubliée. Lectures arabes d`Alexandrie de 1882 à nos jours
Elena CHITI, Université d`Oslo

 Lundi 11 janvier 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Des routes migratoires aux rues marchandes. Réfugiés syriens à Beyrouth
Emmanuelle DURAND, IEP Toulouse
Rendre l`exil visible ou invisible. Des stratégies d`adaptation différenciées. Enquête auprès de jeunes syriens en Île-de-France
Julie SASIA, IIAC-EHESS/CNRS

Lundi 1er février 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Bir al-Sabe` : le projet de fonder une ville pour les Bédouins
Raed BADER, Université de Birzeit

Lundi 7 mars 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Les jeunes de rue des cités HLM : entre résistances collectives et exploitations mutuelles ?
Thomas SAUVADET, Université Paris-Est Créteil

Lundi 4 avril 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Istanbul : les processus d’invisibilisation des pauvres sur les secteurs péricentraux
Yoann MORVAN, IDEMEC/CNRS
Le su et le vu : commentaires sur l`alcool et le visible à Istanbul
Nicolas ELIAS, Musée du Quai Branly

Lundi 9 mai 2016, 17h00-19h00, salle 3.15
Guerre des mémoires et lieux de mémoire à Athènes et Beyrouth. Enjeux académiques et représentations politiques
Maria COUROUCLI, LAUM/IIAC-CNRS/EHESS & Franck MERMIER, LAUM/IIAC-CNRS/EHESS

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