LIVE EVENT - Cooking in the Cauldron: Middle East Studies 1966-2020 (19 November 2020)

LIVE EVENT - Cooking in the Cauldron: Middle East Studies 1966-2020 (19 November 2020)

LIVE EVENT - Cooking in the Cauldron: Middle East Studies 1966-2020 (19 November 2020)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

GMU'S Middle East and Islamic Studies Program
Presents the Annual MEIS Keynote Lecture:

Cooking in the Cauldron:
Middle East Studies 1966-2020


Featuring Suad Joseph


Co-sponsored by:
George Mason University's Center for Global Islamic Studies
and the Arab Studies Institute

19 November 2020 | 1pm EDT


Watch on Facebook.com/Jadaliyya or Facebook.com/GMUMEIS

 
Those without access to Facebook Live may access view the keynote via Zoom. Registration for Zoom access can be found here.

The generation of students that stepped into Middle East Studies in the 1960’s found little institutional presence or support in the academy. The 1960’s and 1970’s taught us the utter necessity to create institutions, to found organizations, to invent spaces for ourselves and for those who came after us to produce knowledge that is historically situated, culturally sensitive, grounded in local contexts and that takes account of race, class, gender, sexuality, religion, ethnicity, and all the markers of the many movements that are afoot.  The talk excavates and analyzes the processes of inventing spaces for rigorous, critical regionally grounded research in Middle East Studies from 1966-2020.
 
Does this genealogy matter today? Should the generation of students stepping into Middle East Studies in the 2020’s care about this history? The lecture argues not only yes, but urgently so. Middle East studies is under threat. Funding for Middle East Studies centers is at risk. Censorship of research, publications, speech is evident even in social media and even in such platforms as Facebook, Zoom, and Twitter. Surveillance of activity is not uncommon, and in some cases, jobs and tenure are tenuous. The weaponization of Islamophobia in electioneering puts lives at stake. Under these conditions, it becomes critical for scholars, especially emerging scholars, to know their histories and mobilize whatever is useful of it into material resources to transform the production of knowledge for themselves and those who will come after them.  

Featuring Suad Joseph

Distinguished Research Professor
University of California, Davis

Suad Joseph is Distinguished Research Professor of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, and Women's Studies. Her research has focused on her native Lebanon, on the politicization of religion; on local communities; on women, family and state; and on questions of self, citizenship, and rights. Her current research is a long-term longitudinal study on how children in a village of Lebanon learn their notions of rights, responsibilities and citizenship in the aftermath of the Civil War and on their transnational families who have moved to the United States and Canada. She is founder the Middle East Research Group in Anthropology (name changed to Middle East Section of the American Anthropological Association). She is founder and Founding Director of the Middle East/South Asia Studies Program, UC Davis. She is founder and director of the Arab Families Working Group (AFWG); founder of the Association for Middle East Women's Studies (AMEWS) and co-founder of AMEW's Journal of Middle East Women's Studies (JMEWS); founder and Director of the University of California Davis Arab Region Consortium which includes American University of Beirut, the American University in Cairo, the Lebanese American University, the University of California and Birzeit and American University of Sharjah. She is currently directing three new projects for UCDAR:  Mapping the Production of Knowledge on Women and Gender in the Arab Region; Transforming Refugee Mental Health; Gendering STEM Educatdion. She served as the President of the Middle East Studies Association of North America, 2010-2011.  She is Founding and General Editor of the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures. Her edited books include: Arab Family Studies: Critical Reviews (Syracuse, 2018);  Women and Islamic Cultures:  Disciplinary Paradigms and Approaches (Brill, 2013l); Gender and Citizenship in the Middle East (Syracuse, 2000), and Intimate Selving in Arab Families (Syracuse, 1999). Her co-edited books include: Arab American Women: Representation and Resistance (Syracuse, In Press); Building Citizenship in Lebanon (Lebanese American University, 1999); Women and Citizenship in Lebanon (1999) and Women and Power in the Middle East (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); and Muslim-Christian Conflicts: Economic, Political, and Social Origins (Westview, 1978). She has published over 100 articles, and won many awards and prizes including the UC Davis Undergraduate Teaching and Research Award, and the Middle East Studies Association’s  Jere L. Bacharach Service Award and the UC Davis Edward A. Dickson Emeriti Professorship.   (http://sjoseph.ucdavis.edu )

 
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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