Live with ASI: Episode 2.7 Digest — January 2022

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Jan 8, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 2.7 Digest — January 2022

By : Jadaliyya Reports

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.

This month, LWA co-hosts MK Smith and Mohammad Abou-Ghazala discussed Issue 8.3 of the Status/الوضع audiovisual journal, wrapped up the Ten Years On project, new texts out now, pedagogy, must-read recommendations, the forthcoming Fall 2021 issue of the Arab Studies Journal, and the upcoming 6th Political Economy Summer Institute.

This episode featured interviews with Paola Messina, Mouin Rabbani, Lisa Hajjar, Adel Iskandar, Alain Gresh, and Samer Abboud.

Status/الوضع Issue 8.3 (1:57)



Issue 8.3 of Status/الوضع is now live! 2021 was a productive year for the Status team—For the first time since 2015, they published three full issues all in one year! That means more critical conversations for all of us to enjoy and engage. 

Issue 8.3 of the audio-visual podcast features six robust episodes. The bundle includes two Arabic-language interviews with Syrian articles, the debut episode of Search Files Podcast from the Knowledge Production Project, and two episodes in collaboration with Maydan, an online publication from the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University. 

This edition also includes an interview between my incredible professor and long-time Status / الوضع host Katty Alhayek and Dr. Sahar Khamis on gender activism, the gender digital gap, and the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on Arab women. To listen to these featured conversations and more, just head over to the Status webpage or to YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, or iTunes. 

The co-hosts spoke with Status/الوضع Associate Producer Paola Messina, who shared some of the highlights in this new issue.

2021 Year-in-Review (8:27)


Over the course of the past year, the ASI team was hard at work, producing all sorts of content on pressing issues dealing with pressing issues ranging from the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, marking 100 years since the founding of Lebanon, the Hirak protests in Algeria, the aftermath of the Gezi protests and the shifting Islamist sector in Turkey, to the Israeli assault on Gaza over the summer.  

And that’s not even mentioning the revamping of the Knowledge Production Project’s website and data visualizations, the numerous exciting podcasts launched under a new emphasis on broadcasting, or the Middle East Learn and Teach series on the Iraq War and Palestine. Needless to say, a lot has happened over the past year, so LWA called on a few of Jadaliyya’s Co-Editors to speak about the notable events of 2021. 

Ten Years On Project: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World — Conclusion (9:22)

 

After 12 months of scholarship, Ten Years On: Mass Protests and Uprisings in the Arab World has come to an end. For those new here, the Ten Years On project was a collaborative initiative launched with the intention 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 present.

It has been an outstanding year, with more than a dozen signature panels, roundtables, book talks, and posts dealing with the uprisings and their aftermath from various perspectives, ranging from history, sociology, arts, film, economics, political science, and much, much more.

Below, you’ll find a link to the Ten Years On project’s website, where you can find all of the events and panels held throughout the course of the project.

Partner’s Feature: Alain Gresh (17:20)

 

So much of what ASI is able to do is thanks to the collaboration and joint effort of many of our close partners. Today, we wanted to take time on the show to highlight one of our deeply valued partners. Alain Gresh.

Alain is the former editor of Le Monde Diplomatique, and is a truly remarkable journalist and thinker. He’s written books on the Middle East, the Islamic world, and the Palestinian national struggle, is a co-founder of Orient XXI publication, and is the director of an exciting new project, Afrique XXI. The co-hosts spoke to Alain about these new initiatives, and issues such as the political scene in France.

Political Economy Summer Institute — Call for Applications (35:52)

 

It is our pleasure to announce that the sixth Political Economy Summer Institute will be held June 2-5, 2022. For those that don’t know, the purpose of the Political Economy Summer Institute (PESI) is both to provide graduate level engagement and instruction, as well as to connect doctoral students and independent researchers with mid-career and senior scholars working in the field of critical political economy.

PESI is a great opportunity for rising scholars and researchers, where students will receive verbal and written feedback on their research, attend workshop sessions on methodology and theory led by faculty scholars, and participate in small break-out discussions that build on the faculty-led sessions. 

Applications are due by January 7th, which is this Friday. Fellowships may be offered to support travel and lodging, subject to availability. 

Co-host and LWA Producer Mohammad Abou-Ghazala speaks with PESI steering committee member Samer Abboud about what’s in store for PESI this year. 
 

Pedagogy (37:22)

 

The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) is rounding out 2021 with the release of an Engaging Books Series installment. This latest showcase of forthcoming books in the field of Middle East Studies features selections on the Arab Uprisings from Georgetown University Press. 

The MESPI team has described 2021 as a successful “building period.” Over the past year, MESPI has been a vital contributor to the Ten Years On Project. In fact, all of MESPIs various modules—from Essential Readings to NEWTONs—have contributed to the collaborative year-long project. 

Promo: Arab Studies Journal — Fall 2021(38:10)


It is our pleasure to let everyone know that the next issue of the Arab Studies Journal (ASJ) is coming very soon!

The Fall 2021 issue of ASJ provides rich and empirically grounded explorations of culture, history, and resistance. It features a Special Section, coordinated by guest editor Brahim El Guabli, that rethinks the territorial, cultural, and human geographies of the Maghrib. It also inaugurates a new essays section of shorter pieces animated by the May 2021 Palestinian “unity intifada.”

We will be covering the upcoming issue of ASJ on LWA once it’s published, so tune in then. 

NEWTONs (38:55)


This month there were several New Texts Out Now interviews with authors of recently-published books. In this month’s show, we highlighted two NEWTONs—and strongly recommended that viewers take a look at the others here. 

In the first NEWTON, Mariam F. Alkazemi and Claudia E. Youakim, the co-editors of Arab World Beyond the Middle East and North Africa, both provided their insights into this collaborative, multi-disciplinary book about the Arab diaspora throughout various world regions. The book touches on the “push” and “pull” factors of emigration; it unpacks the complex trends of settlement; and it highlights the many challenges that immigrants face in a new space.

In her edited book, Rethinking Statehood in Palestine: Self-Determination and Decolonization Beyond Partition, Leila H. Farsakh invited various young Palestinian scholars to think through the challenges of any one-state solution from a legal, political, and economic perspective. The book’s various chapters help advance a new epistemology for the Israeli-Palestinian cause that transcends the nation-state and attempts to construct new ways of looking at decolonization and political liberation. 

Must-Reads (40:13)


We love to end many Live with ASI Episodes with suggested reading. This episode, we suggested two recent Jadaliyya articles.  

First, Aida Bardissi published an article titled, “Anterior Futurisms: Haunted Hegemonies and the Ghostly Chants of the 2011 Egyptian Revolution.” This piece proposes nostalgia as a powerful political tool and sociological phenomenon of “haunting,” and the promises of Nasserism act as a haunting, a temporality that highlights the tension between an idealized past and an unsatisfactory present. Bardissi’s article looks at two chants of the 2011 Revolution to illustrate the capacity for a hegemonic project to haunt its citizens as it continues to live within Egypt’s political landscape. 

Our second must-read of the month—and the last of 2021— is “What Happens to Oasis Farming When the Water Runs Out?” by Jamie Fico. Fico’s article looks at the increased instances of drought in the Middle Draa Valley in southeast Morocco and probes what will happen to the native date palm production.  The article explores how government assistance has prioritized precarious, water-intensive cash crops, like melon, while overlooking the small-scale oasis farmers that protect the declining oasis. 

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Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
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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