Screenings & Panel -- Grounded Struggles: Land, Dispossession, and Freedom (9 February 2017, NYC)

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Jan 11, 2018 Tunisia
Image by Habib Ayeb from the film Image by Habib Ayeb from the film

Screenings & Panel -- Grounded Struggles: Land, Dispossession, and Freedom (9 February 2017, NYC)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Please join us for a series of films and discussions on grassroots struggles for land, dignity, the means of subsistence, and self-determination in Brazil, Morocco, Tunisia, Haiti and the U.S. 

In the face of (neo)colonial/(neo)imperial interventions, increased state repression and intensified capital expansion, these grounded struggles shed light on the mechanisms of dispossession as well as cartographies of resistance, solidarity, and transnational connections. 

By forging alternative modes of development that are not predicated on extraction, surplus, or disposability, these movements expand the horizons of how we might imagine and practice new forms of value and social relations to challenge the structures and logics of racial capitalism.

Featuring

Films:

  • Landless Moroccans (Dir. Soraya El Kahlaoui, 2017)
  • Couscous (Dir. Habib Ayeb, 2017)
  • Strong Roots (Dir. Maria Luisa Mendonça, 2001)


Speakers: 

  • Habib Ayeb, Associate Professor at the University of Paris 8 in Saint Denis, France.
  • Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper, Postdoctoral Scholar, Institute of Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY.
  • Kamau Franklin, Organizer and Founder of Community Movement Builders, Atlanta, Georgia; former organizer, Jackson Plan, Jackson, Mississippi.
  • Soraya El Kahlaoui, doctoral student in sociology, l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
  • Maria Luisa Mendonça, Visiting Scholar, Center for Place, Culture and Politics, CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY.


Speaker Bios and Film Synopses

Habib Ayeb: born in Tunisia, Habib is a social geographer, activist and filmmaker. He is also a researcher and Associate Professor at the University of Paris 8 in Saint Denis (France). His domains of research are: competition over resources in rural and agricultural areas; poverty and marginalization dynamics and processes; and food sovereignty. He also made other documentaries such as “Gabes Labess” in 2014.

Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper is a Postdoctoral Scholar with the Institute of Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean (IRADAC) at the Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY). Her research focuses on the neoliberal configurations of social movements in the American Global South engaged in the alter-globalization movement. Her doctoral work centered on a coalition of organizations calling for an end to the occupation of Haiti. Dougé-Prosper is concerned with the construction of postcolonial nationalist ideologies and collective identities in relation to race and class, gender and sexuality, education and language, and religion.

Kamau Franklin, Organizer and Founder of Community Movement Builders (Atlanta, Georgia). Kamau Franklin has been a dedicated community organizer for over twenty years, first in New York City and now based in the south. He is a former organizer on the Jackson Plan in Mississippi, and was the first campaign manager for Chokwe Lumumba’s successful mayoral election, in Jackson, Mississippi. For 18 years he was a leading member of a national grassroots organization dedicated to the ideas of self-determination and Malcolm X. He has worked on various issues including youth organizing and development, police misconduct, and creating sustainable urban communities. Kamau has led and developed community cop-watch programs, freedom school programs for youth, electoral and policy campaigns, large-scale community gardens, organizing collectives and alternatives to incarceration programs. 

Soraya El Kahlaoui is currently a doctoral student in sociology at l’Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales’ in Paris. her doctoral research aims to analyze the forms of appropriation of public space within the framework of the democratization process that has emerged in Morocco since 2011. She is also an activist and has been coordinating solidarity campaigns with prisoners of the Hirak movements in the Rif, Northern Morocco.

Maria Luisa Mendonça is a visiting scholar in the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a PhD in Human Geography from the Department of Philosophy, Literature and Social Sciences at University of Sao Paulo (USP). She is the founder of Rede Social de Justiça e Direitos Humanos (Network for Social Justice and Human Rights -www.social.org.br) in Brazil and the editor of the book “Human Rights in Brazil,” which has been published annually since 2000. From 2014 until 2016 she was a visiting professor in the International Relations Department of University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). In 2013 she was a visiting scholar in the Development Sociology Department at Cornell University. 

“Landless Moroccans”
A powerful documentary by Soraya El Kahlaoui about the resistance of Douar Ouled Dlim’s residents to their evictions from their homes and land that are situated at the heart of a chic neighbourhood in Rabat. Their struggle against the land grab and the greed of real-estate developers continues today. 2017. 60 minutes
Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_BeWIy5qEOo

“Couscous: Seeds of Dignity”: Almost self-sufficient in grains until the beginning of the 20th century, Tunisia now imports more than half of its food needs as dependency increases from one year to the next. Habib Ayeb’s documentary focuses on the conditions of cereal and couscous production and demonstrates how the food question is in fact at the heart of human dignity and food sovereignty. 2017. 60 minutes.
Trailer: https://vimeo.com/219816447

“Strong Roots” Directed by Maria Luisa Mendonça, this film documents the struggles of peasants in the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in Brazil, which is engaged in a national political campaign to occupy and cultivate unused land. Interviews with several individuals and families are blended with remarkable footage of a mass occupation of unused farmland and subsequent violent confrontations with Brazilian police, vividly illustrating the nature of Brazilian peasants' struggle not only for a piece of land to farm but also for a sense of dignity and justice in their lives. 2001, 41 minutes.

Co-Sponsors 

The New School: GLUE (Global, Urban, and Environmental Studies); Anthropology Department; Sociology Department; The Vera List Center; Lang International Affairs; Robert L. Heilbroner Center for Capitalism Studies, Studley Graduate Program in International Affairs

New York University: Kevorkian Center for Near East Studies

CUNY Graduate Center: The Center for Place, Culture, and Politics

Jadaliyya

Program 

1:30pm: Screening: "Landless Moroccans" followed by Q&A with Director Soraya El Kahlaoui 

3:15pm: “Couscous: Seeds of Dignity” followed by Q&A with Director Habib Ayeb 

5.00pm: Screening: “Strong Roots” followed by Q&A with Director Maria Luisa Mendonça 

6:15-8:00pm: Closing Panel: A Conversation: Grounded Struggles as Prospects for International Resistance: Habib Ayeb;
Mamyrah Dougé-Prosper; Kamau Franklin; Soraya El Kahlaoui; Maria Luisa Mendonça
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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