LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking (26 March)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking (26 March)

LIVE EVENT - Ten Years On Project: Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking (26 March)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University and 
The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, UC Santa Barbara Present:

Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking 

More info at www.TheArabUprisings.org


This event is cosponsored by “Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World” (TYO) Project


Featuring:

Reem Bailony, Agnes Scott College
Rosie Bsheer, Harvard University
Muriam Haleh Davis, UC Santa Cruz
Pascale Ghazaleh, American University in Cairo
Sara Pursley, New York University
Nadya Sbaiti, American University of Beirut

Moderator: Sherene Seikaly, UC Santa Barbara

Friday, 26 March 2021
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM EDT



This roundtable has been organized in an effort to mark, interrogate, and reflect on various protests, revolutions, and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa in the past ten years. Featuring a collection of scholars of the MENA region from a variety of disciplines, this event will place emphasis on the relationship between archives, historical thinking, and revolution—both in the past and present. 

TYO is organized by: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, and George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Project.

Co-sponsored by: ACSS, American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), American University of Cairo affiliates, Arab Studies Institute, Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Project, Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), Georgetown University (Qatar), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), Institute of Palestine Studies, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, Stanford University (Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies).

Click here to learn more about this roundtable.

For any questions, contact Liz Flanagan.

This roundtable will be broadcast live on Jadaliyya's Facebook.

Featuring


Reem Bailony
 is an assistant professor of Middle East history at Agnes Scott College. She is currently working on her book, Transnational Rebellion: The Syrian Revolt of 1925-1927, which explores Syrian-Lebanese diasporic mobilizations during the 1925 revolt against the French Mandatory government. Before joining Agnes Scott, Reem was the American Druze Foundation postdoctoral fellow at Georgetown University. 

Rosie Bsheer is Assistant Professor of History at Harvard University. She is Co-Editor of Jadaliyya e-zine and Associate Editor of Tadween Publishing.

Muriam Haleh Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is a co-editor of the Maghreb page on Jadaliyya and is also on the editorial committee of the Middle East Research and Information Project (MERIP). She co-edited a volume published by Bloomsbury Academic Press in 2018 entitled “North Africa and the Making of Europe: Governance, Institutions and Culture” and has published in the Journal of Contemporary HistoryMiddle East Critique, and the Journal of European Integration History. 

Pascale Ghazaleh is Assistant Professor of History at the American University in Cairo. She is the author of Fortunes Urbaines et Strategies Sociales: Genealogies Patrimoniales au Caire, 1780-1830 (Cairo: IFAO, 2010), and the editor of Held in Trust: Waqf in the Islamic World (Cairo: AUC Press, 2011).

Sara Pursley is assistant professor of modern Middle East history in the departments of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and of History at NYU. She is the author of Familiar Futures: Time, Selfhood, and Sovereignty in Iraq (Stanford University Press, 2019) and numerous articles, including “Ali al-Wardi and the Miracles of the Unconscious," Psychoanalysis & History 20/3 (2018): 337-51; "The Stage of Adolescence: Anticolonial Time, Youth Insurgency, and the Marriage Crisis in Hashimite Iraq," History of the Present 3/2 (2013): 160-97; and "'Lines Drawn on an Empty Map': Iraq's Borders and the Legend of the Artificial State," Jadaliyya, 2 June 2015.

Nadya Sbaiti is Assistant Professor at the Center for Arab and Middle Eastern Studies (CAMES) at the American University Beirut (AUB).  She is a co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya.

Sherene Seikaly (Moderator) is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the editor of the Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, an editor of Journal of Palestine Studies, a policy member of Al-Shabaka, the Palestinian Policy Network, and an advisory member of R-Shief Online Archive Project. Seikaly's Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. She has published in academic journals such as International Journal of Middle East Studies and Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies as well as in online venues including Jadaliyya, Mada Masr, and 7iber.

Ten Years On
Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World


This event is part of the Ten Years on Project, a year-long series of events, reflections, and conversations created to commemorate the tenth anniversary of the start of the Arab uprisings in Tunisia. We launched this project in order to interrogate and reflect on the uprisings, with the hope of producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the lived present.

Watch all of our previous Ten Years on events here:

 
 
 
 
Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program.

Co-Sponsors by: ACSS, American University of Beirut (Asfari Institute), American University of Cairo affiliates, Arab Studies Institute, Birzeit University (Department of Political Science), Brown University (Center for Middle East Studies), George Mason’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Project, Georgetown University (Center for Contemporary Arab Studies), Georgetown University (Qatar), Harvard University (Center for Middle East Studies), Institute of Palestine Studies, Princeton’s Arab Barometer, Stanford University (Center for Democracy, Development, and Rule of Law), The Global Academy (MESA Affiliated), University of Exeter (Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies), UC Santa Barbara (Center for Middle East Studies).

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