Live with ASI: Episode 6 Digest – February 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 6 Digest – February 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 6 Digest – February 2021

By : Arab Studies Institute

Live with ASI is a new monthly broadcast program that showcases recently published content from the Arab Studies Institute’s various branches. This content includes articles, reviews, pedagogical resources, podcasts, and more. Also featured in the broadcast are brand new interviews and discussions with authors and contributors. In this episode, hosts Bassam Haddad and MK Smith discussed themes such as politics and culture, pedagogy, and covered books from the New Texts Out Now (NEWTON) series. This episode featured recurring segments from Adel Iskandar, Carly A. Krakow, and Cat Haseman, and included engaging interviews with Jacob Bessen and Mekarem Eljamal of the MESPI team, Maya Mikdashi, Sherene Seikaly, Owain Lawson, Huma Gupta, and Hatem Bazian.

All of the materials mentioned in the broadcast are listed here, categorized by their themes. Also listed are additional recent materials that we highly recommend. Pieces that are relevant to multiple themes are listed under each applicable theme below. 

 


Politics and Culture (2:35)


In her piece titled, “Cultural Colonialism: The Slippery Domain of Integration,” Sadaf Javdani addresses the implications of holding social and cultural integration as markers of “successful” immigration. Instead of fostering a dynamic process where the receiving society works together with the immigrants to build vibrant and cohesive spaces, Javdani argues that “integration” has become synonymous with “assimilation” into European norms and values.

Writing on the response to the United States’s assassination of Qassem Soleimani, Sara Tafakori addresses the role of gender in forming conceptions of honor and nationalism in her piece “(Trans)national Mourning and the Politics of Grievability.”

Palestinian singer Faraj Suleiman has released an album in collaboration with the novelist and songwriter Majd Kayyal titled, “Better than Berlin.” In his article “The Palestinian City, the Song, and Settler Colonial Gentrification,” Hashem Abu Shama هاشم أبو شمعة takes a deeper look at the album’s wide range of topics grappling with the complexities undergirding Palestinian realities in contemporary Haifa. 

In “Hajj as Metaphor,” Mahdi Chowdhury dissects Iranian intellectual Ali Shariʿati’s book “Analysis of the Rituals of Hajj,” paying special attention to the use of metaphor, which is used to deconstruct religious symbols and illustrate the hajj as a transformative, revolutionary experience.

H.A. Hellyer’s article titled “Powerful Scholars and Clerics of Power: Remembering Shaykh Emad Effat” reflects on the life and legacy of Shaykh al-Thawra, as Effat is known. He has been immortalized as an Egyptian revolutionary since his murder in 2011.


Beyond Old / New Media with Adel Iskander (4:08)


Adel Iskander joined LWA to lead his recurring segment on media goings-on in the Arab World. This month Adel discussed commemorative moments and looked at “spectacular spectacles” of the Arab Uprisings. 


Pedagogy (14:55)


Jacob Bessen and Mekarem Eljamal discuss the process, goals, and pedagogical impact of MESPI Essential Readings (ER). Jacob shared a couple of his favorite ER’s of the year: Politics and Popular Culture in the Middle East and North Africa (by Nicola Pratt) and Land, Water, and the Environment in Israeli Occupied Palestinian Territories (by Sophia Stamatopoulou-Robbins).


The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) brought us the fourteenth in a series of “Peer-Reviewed Articles Reviews” in which the team, led by Shakeela Omar, present a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. The series is published seasonally, and last month, MESPI posted Parts 1, 2, and 3 of the Fall 2020 Peer-Reviewed Articles Review.


Feature: Top-100 Most Read Articles on Jadaliyya in 2020 (26:06)


Maya Mikadshi speaks about her Top-100 Jadaliyya article titled “How Not to Study Gender in the Middle East,” which she wrote in 2012. Maya explains that if she were to update the piece today, she would ground it in an intersectional transnational Middle East approach. 


In this segment, co-hosts Bassam and MK discussed the “Top-100 Most Read Articles on
Jadaliyya in 2020.” They also spoke live with Jadaliyya Co-Editor Maya Mikdashi, author of an article on studying gender that has made the top 100 list nine years in a row, regarding the origins of her piece and any revisions or developments that may have been made over the past decade.


The Catch-Up: International Current Affairs with Carly A. Krakow (42:00)


Carly A. Krakow, Jadaliyya’s Managing Editor for Special Projects, was on the show to discuss international current affairs for her new recurring segment. This month she discussed the aftermath of the Trump administration’s Middle East policies; the Biden administration’s latest actions regarding Yemen, Palestine, and the climate crisis; and the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. She concluded with some comments about Joe Biden’s presidential inauguration (complete with a variety of Bernie Sanders mittens memes), and thoughts regarding the future of the progressive wing of the US Democratic Party.

 

Feature: Ten Years On: Reflections on Mass Protests & Uprisings in the Arab World (50:35)


Sherene Seikaly discusses her upcoming panel in March on “Archives and Uprisings” with Rosie Bsheer. She also shared her experience living and teaching in Cairo during the revolution and the importance of looking to the younger generation for leadership.


Last month, we covered the new, year-long project that aims to produce much-needed knowledge through critical, collaborative reflection on the past ten years since the Arab Uprisings began. And since we don’t want anyone to miss out on these incredible discussions, we’re integrating the Ten Years On project into our LWA broadcasts as a recurring segment in which we highlight the panels and contributions of that month. 

Each of the panels addresses reflections by the speakers on the politics and knowledge production related to the uprisings during the past ten years. Last month we hosted a two-part panel as part of a series by the collective project "Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World." 

Be sure to keep an eye out for the next event in this series this month on teaching the Arab Uprisings.


Call for Submissions: Environment Page (1:02:10)


Carly A. Krakow spoke with fellow Co-Editors of Jadaliyya’s Environment Page, Owain Lawson and Huma Gupta, to discuss the Environment Page’s mission and the goals for their new Call for Submissions. The page is seeking contributions that address connections between environmental questions and the Arab Uprisings.


Ten years since the beginning of the events that have come to be understood as the Arab Uprisings, the Jadaliyya Environment Page, which was founded last year as a forum for innovative, critical, and incisive analysis and reporting on environmental questions in the Middle East, is calling for article submissions that provide critical analyses of the relationship between the uprisings and environmental questions in the Middle East and North Africa. 


Feature: A Conversation on A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East and North Africa (1:08:40)


Bassam Haddad spoke with Hatem Bazian regarding the newly published volume, A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East, as well as Berkeley’s Islamophobia Studies Center.


Hatem Bazian from UC Berkeley hosted an online discussion with Bassam Haddad, Sherene Seikaly, and Joel Beinin regarding the recently published volume, A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East. This volume contains contributions from leading scholars, representing several disciplines. Their writings critically examine major issues in political economy, ranging from the mutual constitution of state and class, the intricacies of race, gender, and class in the formulation of identity, to the relation between local, regional, and global forms of capital, race, and class. 


NEWTONs (1:16:40)


In Nazanin Shahrokni’s NEWTON interview, she discusses the deeply personal and political nature of her new book
Women in Place: The Politics of Gender Segregation in Iran, which examines gender segregation policies and women’s rights in contemporary Iran.

Bashir Bashir and Leila Farsakh are the editors of The Arab and Jewish Questions: Geographies of Engagement in Palestine and Beyond, which is a product of a series of international dialoguing workshops that explore Jewish Engagements with the Arab Question and Arab Engagements with Jewish Questions. 

A Region in Revolt: Mapping the Latest Uprisings in North Africa and West Asia, edited by Jade Saab, pushes the conversation surrounding the Arab Uprisings far past the mainstream reductionist conversation, offers in-depth discussions of the history and economic conditions of each affected country.

Judith Surkis’s book Sex, Law, and Sovereignty in French Algeria, 1830-1930 traces how colonial authorities constructed Muslim legal difference and used it to deny Algerian Muslims full citizenship. 

Joel Beinin, who is a co-editor of the new volume, A Critical Political Economy of the Modern Middle East, also wrote the introductory chapter and a chapter titled, “The US-Israeli Alliance,” which he discusses in his NEWTON. 

In her book Coups and Revolutions: Mass Mobilization, the Egyptian Military, and the United States from Mubarak to Sisi, Amy Austin Holmes highlights a wide spectrum of activist groups during what she sees as three waves of revolutionary uprisings followed by two waves of counterrevolution.


Grad Student Corner with Cat Haseman (1:19:45)


In her recurring segment, Cat Haseman points graduate students to helpful resources produced in the previous month. 


With the publication of the Top-100 Most Read Articles on Jadaliyya in 2020, Cat pointed to three of the articles she believes are of particular interest to graduate students:


Don’t forget to check out this month’s Media Roundups:  


Must-Reads (1:23:40)


In “Karama: An Immigrant Neighborhood Transformed,” Bhoomika Ghaghada describes how Karama, an historically significant neighborhood of Dubai home to many immigrants, is changing, as space for economic participation diminishes and the neighborhood becomes a more affluent space, built around consumer choice. 

In “How Arab Americans Helped Decide the U.S. Election” Gabriel Davis looks at the numbers as well as the variety of push and pull factors that persuaded Arab Americans to vote for President Joe Biden in November. 

Ella Shohat writes on the highly contentious narrative regarding the mass exodus of Iraqi Jews in the 1950s in her piece, “Sant al-Tasqit”: Seventy Years since the Departure of Iraqi Jews,” where she unpacks the effects of 20th Century political and historical forces on Arab Jewish narrative and identity. 


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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