[CFA-Extended Deadline] Third Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at GMU | October 11, 2019

[CFA-Extended Deadline] Third Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at GMU | October 11, 2019

[CFA-Extended Deadline] Third Annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at GMU | October 11, 2019

By : Jadaliyya Reports


[CFA] THIRD ANNUAL GRADUATE STUDENT BOOK REVIEW COLLOQUIUM ON ISLAMIC AND MIDDLE EASTERN STUDIES at GMU
  

OCTOBER 11, 2019

The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University and The Maydan, the Center’s digital scholarship platform, present the third annual Graduate Student Book Review Colloquium on Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies to be held on October 11, 2019, in collaboration with the Fall for the Book Festival. Please refer to the application procedures detailed below. The extended deadline for applications is July 8, 2019.

Objective


The Colloquium invites advanced graduate students in the social sciences and humanities to submit reviews on noteworthy books published between 2017-2019 in the field of Islamic and Middle Eastern studies. The Colloquium is organized by The Maydan, an online publication of the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies. The Maydan is dedicated to supporting Islamic Studies with the recognition that academic scholarship in this field of inquiry is currently in need of discussions and publications that are able to disseminate research to a larger audience. The Colloquium aims to foster a lasting conversation between academic and lay readership.

At the Colloquium, the accepted students will have the opportunity to present their book reviews in pre-organized panels lasting 20 minutes, and then discuss their reviews with leading scholars in the field. With such discussions, the colloquium will bring the reviewed books to the attention of the larger audience attending the Fall for the Book festival at George Mason University (http://fallforthebook.org).

In selecting their books, reviewers are expected to focus on a single monograph – edited volumes and reference works remain outside the scope of this Colloquium – and to demonstrate engagement with the existing literature, using references to at least two books on a similar theme. The reviewers are encouraged to construct their works with particular attention to the context, content and critique of the selected book.

Each colloquium participant will be reimbursed up to $500 to cover travel and accommodation costs. Reimbursements are conditional on adherence to the following submission dates and on full participation in the colloquium.

Application Process and Important Dates


Interested candidates should submit the following:

1) A 500-word abstract that presents a justification for the selection of the work under examination (please refer to the list of possible books below).

2) A short writing sample (5 pages maximum) on the broader theme of the selected book.

3) A resume (2 pages maximum).

All three documents should be emailed to Ahmet Selim Tekelioglu at atekelio@gmu.edu as a single PDF file by July 8, 2019, 11:59 pm EST.

The subject line of the email should appear in the following format: [LASTNAME, BOOK REVIEW COLLOQUIUM 2019].

Acceptance notices and the books under review will be sent to the reviewers on July 15, 2019.

Reviewers will be asked to submit their reviews (1300 words maximum) by September 16, 2019.

Final products will be considered for publication on The Maydan. The Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University will offer a $100 honorarium to the authors of reviews that are selected for publication.

List of Possible Books


Please refer to the list of books curated under The Maydan’s Book Display database (https://www.themaydan.com/tag/book-display/).

*Books previously presented in the 2017 and 2018 Colloquia are not eligible for reviews in the 2019 Colloquium.

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