Live with ASI: Episode 2.5 Digest — November 2021

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Nov 16, 2021
Live with ASI: Episode 2.5 Digest — November 2021

Live with ASI: Episode 2.5 Digest — November 2021

By : Arab Studies Institute

[Live with ASI is a 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.]

Jad’s 11th Anniversary (4:14)


We are very happy to share with everyone that this month marks Jadaliyya’s 11th birthday! 

Over the last 11 years, Jadaliyya has grown tremendously in ways we truly could never have imagined. Stay on the lookout for an 11th anniversary post on Jadaliyya that will highlight a year of knowledge production and celebrate the many activists, journalists, and scholars who have collaborated and published scholarship over the past year. 

Co-hosts Bassam and MK wish a happy 11th birthday to Jadaliyya and invite Egypt Page Co-Editor Hesham Sallam on the show to reflect on more than ten years of the publication’s oldest content page. 
 

Ten Years On Project (16:05) 


We are now in the 11th month in the year-long collaborative Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World. 

Last week, the Ten Years On project held a panel titled “Displacement, Disruption, and Scholarly Production,” where scholars from the region discussed the specific effects of displacement on cultural and knowledge production in the region following the 2011 Uprisings. The panelists looked at the many impacts of authoritarian retrenchment and targeting of universities throughout the region, and spoke to their own experiences as scholars and academics.

With us now is one of the panel’s participants, Basileus Zeno, who is Karl Loewenstein Fellow and Visiting Lecturer in Political Science at Amherst College.

Basileus Zeno distills key takeaways from the recent Ten Years On panel discussion titled “Displacement, Disruption, and Scholarly Production.” 
 


In March earlier this year, the Centers for Middle East Studies at Harvard University and the University of California, Santa Barbara held a roundtable titled “Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking” as part of the Ten Years On Project. The participants published their contributions to the roundtable in Jadaliyya last month, so be sure to check it out in the Digest.

As Jadaliyya Co-Editor Sherene Seikaly remarks in the Editor’s Introduction, this roundtable brought together a variety of esteemed scholars to reflect on the relationships between revolutions, archives, and how we think about history. They each address these questions from the perspective of different countries, such as Syria, Iran, Iraq, Algeria, and Egypt.

Nadya Sbaiti talks about a past Ten Years On panel titled “Archives, Revolution, and Historical Thinking." 
 

Connections Podcast: Invention of Palestine


For the 20th episode of the Connections podcast, Jadaliyya Co-Editor and friend of the show Mouin Rabbani spoke with Zachary Foster, who earned his PhD in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. In this episode, titled “The Invention of Palestine,” Mouin and Zachary examined how and why the terms “Palestine” and “Palestinian” came to be contested, and measured various claims in this regard against the historical record.

Zachary Foster joins the show live to talk about his research, which was recently highlighted and dissected on Connections Podcast Episode 20: "The Invention of Palestine with Zachary Foster" hosted by Mouin Rabbani. 
 

Tankra Tamazight: Revival of Amazigh Indigeneity in Literature and Art


We have a very special series published on Jadaliyya’s Maghreb Page, titled “Tankra Tamazight, Amazigh Revival, and Indigeneity in North Africa.” This thorough collection of articles takes on the monumental and crucial task of grappling with the ongoing “awakening” in Amazigh language and culture. 

The series addresses this awakening in its various aspects, such as literature, cinema, and art, and calls for a revamping of Amazigh studies so as to prioritize the study of Amazigh cultural production in its own language. 

Brahim el Guabli calls in to the show to discuss the recent series on Amazigh Studies published on Jadaliyya’s Maghreb Page, titled "Tankra Tamazight: The Revival of Amazigh Indigeneity in Literature & Art"
 

1979 Generation Podcast


In 2019, Jadaliyya’s Iran Page launched a podcast series titled, “1979 Generation,” which focused on feminism and revolution by drawing on personal memory as well as activist and scholarly engagements. Hosted by Iran Page Co-Editor Manijeh Nasrabadi, this series brought Iranian feminists who lived through the 1978-1979 revolution to share their stories of revolutionary upheaval and the contested role of women in the national liberation project and to reflect on what feminism means to them.

After a hiatus, we are thrilled to share with everyone Manijeh Nasrabadi is once again picking up the mic to continue this fantastic series! In fact, MK spoke with Manijeh yesterday about her upcoming episode. Let’s take a look.

After a brief hiatus, the 1979 Generation Podcast is back. Manijeh Nasrabadi speaks with co-host MK Smith about the show, which shares stories of revolutionary upheaval and the contested role of women in the nat'l liberation project in Iran.
 

Pedagogy


The MESPI team published a new Engaging Book Series. As a reminder to our viewers, Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. This installation features Gingko Library’s Selection of works on the theme of the Arab Uprisings. 

MESPI also published the fourth part of their Spring 2021 Peer Reviewed Articles Review, or PRAR, which presents a collection of journals and their articles concerned with the Middle East and Arab world. Skimming through the titles and abstracts featured in the PRAR is a great way to keep current on the state of the field. 

As part of the Ten Years On project, Elizabeth Kassab put together an amazing Essential Readings on Philosophy and the Uprisings with MESPI. The post covers writings dealing with all sorts of questions, especially pertaining to what the appropriate role for the intellectual is during an uprising. This ER is crucial for anyone interested in how the uprisings have affected philosophical productions in the region, and the relationship between the quest for a sense of self and the post-independence state. 

Grad Student Corner


Cat Haseman calls in to the show for her monthly segment, the Grad Student Corner, and to highlight the Jadaliyya Foreign Policies media round-up. 
 

NEWTONS


There were several New Text Out Now interviews conducted this month with a variety of authors. 

First, we have an interview with Rose Wellman about her new book titled “Feeding Iran: Shi`i Families and the Making of the Islamic Republic.” Wellman’s work contributes to the field of food studies while showing that food in Iran is about more than a means of providing nutirion. In her words, food is “an agent of transformation and a vehicle for channeling divine blessing,” and beyond the household, state elites employ food to articulate, shape, and contest the making of an Islamic nation.

In a NEWTON interview about the book “Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics under Neoliberal Islam,” Evren Savcı describes her ethnographic methodology of tracing the travel of the contemporary vocabulary of gender and sexual episteme and politics to Turkey. Among other things, her book explores the importance of the vocabulary queer activists employ in shaping the kinds of politics they practiced. 

Must-Reads


Our first Must-Read article is titled “Undocumented Tunisian Migrants: Italy’s Use of Inhumane Detention as a Deterrence Strategy” by Jyhene Kebsi. This piece details the confinement conditions of detained Tunisian migrants in Italy, which are often worse than the conditions of criminal imprisonment. The piece further probes how these conditions are experienced as a form of punishment. 

Our second must-read article is a film review by Huma Gupta titled “Environmental Film Review: She Was Not Alone 2020 Independent Iraqi Film Festival.” The article offers insights into Basra-based director Hussein al-Asadi’s short film about Fatima, a 50 year old unmarried woman who lives alone in the Iraqi swamplands. Head over to Jadaliyya’s environment page to read this review and then consider watching the acclaimed film.

Finally, in his piece titled “Islamic Republic of Rock,” Alireza DOOS-dar reflects on two years of researching the Iranian rock and heavy metal scene as part of a larger project of post-revolution cultural politics. What he finds is a complex landscape of exchange and experimentation, complicating the dominant account of a supposed opposition between underground “Western” music and authentic “Islamic” culture.

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

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