Live with ASI: Episode 2.9 Digest — March 2022

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Mar 3, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 2.9 Digest — March 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, co-hosts Bassam Haddad and MK Smith discussed new episodes of the Connections Podcast, a lecture on Arab fandom and fantasy TV series, a new installment of the Mofeed-19 podcast, a panel on Russian, Chinese, and American foreign policy, new texts out now, and a host of pedagogic materials.

This episode featured interviews with Mekarem Eljamal, Katty Alhayek, Mouin Rabbani, and Omar Dahi.

NEWTONs


Our first New Texts Out Now is a translated novel, titled “I Do Not Sleep,” written by Egyptian author Ihsan Abdel Kouddous. In the NEWTON interview, the translator, Jonathan Smolin, describes how the book can be read literally as the story of a family scandal, but at the same time, it can be metaphorically read as a reflection on the consequences of military dictatorship in Egypt. 

Our second NEWTON uniquely brings together two bodies of scholarly work that do not overlap often: biology and Middle East studies. “Genetic Crossroads: The Middle East and the Science of Human Heredity” by Ellise K. Burton details the history of human genetics through Middle Eastern sources and perspectives with a focus on the relationship between ethnic nationalisms and the science of genetics.

Pedagogy


The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative published the third and final installment in a series of bouquets of articles on various aspects of the Arab uprisings in academic journal articles published during 2010–2020 in Middle East studies and related fields. Whereas the previous installments covered articles dealing with “Cultural Production” and “Gender and Sexuality” during the Arab uprisings, this third bouquet highlights those articles that include a spatial comparison between different entities, political dynamics, and discourses in the uprisings.

In other pedagogy news, MESPI is integrating the Ten Years On project into its website as a fully-functional module! For those that don’t know, the Ten Years On project was a year-long initiative that marked ten years since the outbreak of the Arab Uprisings of 2011 by producing resources for educators, researchers, students, and journalists to understand the last decade of political upheaval historically and in the present.

As a treat, MESPI published a sneak peek into the Peer-Reviewed Articles Review’s collection of articles dealing with the Arab uprisings! It will be linked in the Digest, but be sure to check the MESPI Ten Years On module to see the forthcoming complete collection. 

Mekarem Eljamal, MESPI’s Managing Editor, points viewers to the new MESPI module dedicated to pedagogical materials from the Ten Years On project.
 

Mofeed-19 Podcast


Launched in partnership between ASI and the Stanford University’s Program on Arab Reform and Democracy, Mofeed-19 is the aptly-named 19-minute video podcast that discusses research efforts pertaining to the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on the Arab world.

The podcast, co-hosted by Hesham Sallam and Amr Hamzawy, is part of the Mofeed-19 Project, an initiative that builds foundational resources for understanding how the politics and societies of the Arab world have adapted in light of the pandemic.

For their fourth episode, the co-hosts invited award-winning Palestinian-Jordanian writer, Ibrahim Nasrallah, for a discussion in Arabic on the pandemic and literary production. 

Connections Podcast


The Connections podcast, hosted by Mouin Rabbani, combines journalism, analysis, and scholarship to offer timely and informative interviews on current events and broader policy questions, as well as themes relevant to knowledge production.

Over the last month, the Connections podcast put out four new episodes, interviewing noted experts on topics such as Israel’s clandestine campaigns of terror in the Middle East, the Tunisian President’s consolidation of power since his suspension of parliament, the challenges confronting the Libyan state and society due to persistent conflict, and the state of Afghanistan since the Taliban’s ascension to power.

Connections host Mouin Rabanni joins the show to offer a recap of his three most recent podcast episodes. 
 

Arab Fandom and Creative Political Participation 


A couple of weeks ago, ASI co-sponsored a panel put on by George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies program titled, “Arab Fandom and Creative Political Participation.” 

In this panel, Jadaliyya Syria Page co-editor and Assistant Professor in the School of Professional Communication at Ryerson University (renaming in progress), Katty Alhayek, examined the case of popular fantasy TV show, Game of Thrones, and how the devoted Arab fandom interacted with the series. 

Her research addresses how fans’ cultural participation can contribute to our understanding of non-traditional political participation.

Katty Alhayek discusses her research on creative political participation in the Arab world. 
 

Security in Context


This month ASI’s partners at Security in Context held a webinar titled, “Understanding US, Russian, and Chinese Foreign Policy.”. The discussion was part of a series aiming to explore the implications of multipolarity and 21st century geopolitics in the Global South.

The panel discussion featured a number of scholars focused on Russia or China, including Min Ye, Dave Lewis, Michael Klare, and Lee Jones, Constantine Pleshakov, and Daria Isachenko. The panel, which took place before Russia’s February 24th invasion of Ukraine, started with a discussion of the interplay between Russia’s domestic politics and foreign policy. The latter half of the conversation focused on China. Panelists offered alternative perspectives on the intentions and impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative.

Omar Dahi, the founder and director of Security in Context, joined the show live to recap the panel and to discuss how the conversation connects to critical security work within and about the Arab world. 

Omar Dahi discusses current and future work of Security in Context.

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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