Call for Papers - Politics and Popular Culture in the Middle East: 
Power and Resistance Post-2011 (University of Warwick, 10 December 2018)

Call for Papers - Politics and Popular Culture in the Middle East: 
Power and Resistance Post-2011 (University of Warwick, 10 December 2018)

Call for Papers - Politics and Popular Culture in the Middle East: 
Power and Resistance Post-2011 (University of Warwick, 10 December 2018)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
7-8 May 2019

Keynote speaker:
Charles Tripp, Professor Emeritus, SOAS

Call for Papers

Over the past decade or so, popular culture has attracted increasing attention from scholars of the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, the mass protests and uprisings from the end of 2010 onwards sparked interest in popular culture as a vehicle for mobilizing and articulating resistance to authoritarianism (amongst others, Abaza 2013, El Hamamsy and Soliman 2013, Mostafa and Valassopoulos 2014, Salih and Richter-Devroe 2014, Swedenburg 2012).

This workshop builds on and extends the insights of this body of literature to consider the relationship between politics and popular culture more broadly. We define popular culture to include a range of mass cultural and subcultural forms (such as, TV, film, graffiti, cartoons, music, dance) recognizing that the boundaries between popular culture and ‘high culture’ or ‘folk culture’ are fluid and contingent. Meanwhile, we conceptualize politics to include not only formal political processes, actors and institutions but also the political economy of popular cultural production alongside the struggles over the cultural meanings that are constitutive of power relations.

We invite abstracts exploring the intersections of politics and popular culture in the contemporary Middle East and North Africa from any relevant discipline. We are particularly interested in papers that address the following themes:

  • The role of popular culture in both promoting progressive/revolutionary as well as reactionary/counter-revolutionary political agendas and ideas
  • The use of popular culture by marginalized/subordinated social groups –such as women, workers, economically-marginalized groups, ethnic and religious minorities, LGBTQ communities and refugees
  • The use of popular culture by elites and governments
  • State policies towards popular culture
  • Religion and popular culture
  • The political economy of popular culture
  • The role of popular culture in resistance
  • The role of popular culture in representing the past and shaping public memory
  • The politics of aesthetics in relation to popular culture
  • The politics of space in relation to popular culture
  • The politics of identity (gender, nation, race, class, sexuality) in popular culture

We also welcome contributions that examine popular culture in the Middle East and North Africa in other historical moments and/or in relation to longer-term struggles that cannot be reduced to the Arab uprisings and their aftermath.

A selection of papers will be published as part of a special issue of a peer-reviewed journal.

Deadline for submissions is 10 December 2018. Successful applicants will be notified by 3 January 2019.

There is no workshop fee for successful applicants. Some bursaries may be available to cover travel costs for those coming from outside Europe, particularly from the Middle East and North Africa.

Submission Format
Please submit the following details in a word document/pdf file:

  • Name(s)
  • Title(s) and affiliation(s)
  • Paper title
  • Abstract of 350 words
  • Short bio of 250 words
  • Corresponding email address
     

For submissions or inquiries please email us at: popcultureMENA@warwick.ac.uk

Conveners:

  • Nicola Pratt, University of Warwick
  • Dina Rezk, University of Reading
  • Dalia Mostafa, University of Manchester 

This conference is funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of grant no. AH/N004353/1: ‘Politics and Popular Culture: Contested Narratives of the 25 January 2011 Revolution and its Aftermath’. For more details, go to: warwick.ac.uk/egyptpopculture

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