Live with ASI: Episode 2.13 Digest — July 2022

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Jul 13, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 2.13 Digest — July 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 Bassam Haddad discussed the new Spring 2022 Issue of the Arab Studies Journal, a new issue of Status / الوضع Audiovisual Journal, the Navigating Anti-Authoritarianism and Anti-Imperialism project, a series titled, “Music Politics After the Arab Uprisings,” a new episode of the Connections Podcast, pedagogy, and more.

This episode also featured interviews with Starling Carter, Arang Keshavarzian, Zein El-Amine, Mohamad-Ali Nayel, Mouin Rabbani, Mekarem Eljamal, Carly A. Krakow, and Shakeela Omar.

Arab Studies Journal Announces Spring 2022 Issue


This new Spring 2022 issue of ASJ is now available. The issue provides a varied and critical foray into intellectual production, history, and institutional organization, and includes two empirically-grounded and historiographically-challenging articles, one by Chloe Kattar on Christian conservatism in Lebanon in the years preceding the 15-year civil war. Also featured is an article by Noureddine Jebnoun on the history of the UAE’s conscription of foreign personnel into its armed forces.

Additionally, the issue includes another robust installment of book reviews, offering insight into a range of topics, including US foreign policy, Islamist institutional organization, moral ecology, and training in the decorative arts.

Navigating Anti-Authoritarianism and Anti-Imperialism


We are excited to share with you that a very special project that has been in the works for a long while finally kicked off last month! The Navigating Anti-Authoritarianism and Anti-Imperialism project will host a number of workshops, panels, and conversations regarding the critical nuances at play when dealing with anti-authoritarian movements within the context of imperialism.

The project seeks to address questions on the efficacy of current definitions, conceptual trade-offs, analytical thresholds, and so much more. And actually, we held our very first workshop last month, and it was a very dynamic and fruitful discussion.

Stay tuned for future public sessions and workshops!

Associate Professor and Department Chair at NYU’s College of Arts and Science, Arang Keshavarzian, speaks on the challenges of critiquing authoritarianism within imperial contexts.
 

Status / الوضع Issue 9.2 is Live!


Issue 9.2 of Status / الوضع Audiovisual Journal is now live! Coming just in time for the summer, this Issue comes packed with programs, panels, and standalone interviews, covering topics as varied as Arabic dialects in Sub-Saharan Africa to an analysis of the Nile River as a realm of practice. 

You can find Issue 9.2 on Spotify, iTunes, Soundcloud, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Status / الوضع Associate Producer Starling Carter shares some of the highlights of Issue 9.2, and speaks on future Issues.
 

 A Conversation with Zein El-Amine


Last month, Bassam Haddad spoke with activist-organizer-author-thinker extraordinaire Zein El-Amine regarding his new book titled, “Is this How You Eat a Watermelon?” among a number of other topics. 

The conversation will be published in full soon on Jadaliyya, but in the meantime, Zein joined the show to speak more on his book, the issues facing adjunct faculty on campuses, and current and future work.

Zein El-Amine speaks on his new book, and union-busting at American University.
 

 Music Politics After the Arab Uprisings


In a two-part series on Music Politics after the Arab Uprisings published on Jadaliyya, Mohamad-Ali Nayel delves deep into the social, political, and cultural dimensions of music production in the Arab world over the last decade. 

The series is a spectacular investigation of how the music landscape in the region was profoundly affected by the monumental events of the Arab Uprisings and their aftermath. 

Mohamad-Ali Nayel shares his inspiration for writing this piece, and how music influenced his generation during and after the Arab Uprisings.
 

Connections Podcast


Last month, Jadaliyya Co-Editor Mouin Rabbani published another great episode of Connections Podcast. In case you’re not already familiar, the Connections Podcast 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.

Mouin spoke with Dalia Hatuqa, who is an independent journalist specializing in Palestinian-Israeli affairs, on the summary execution of legendary Palestinian journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh.

Connections Podcast Host Mouin Rabbani shares highlights from his conversation with Dalia Hatuqa, as well as future interviews.
 

Pedagogy


The Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative team published three Essential Readings posts, dealing with the urban question and epidemics. If you don’t already know, the Essential Readings series is curated by MESPI, where scholars are invited to contribute lists of crucial texts and readings on a topic relevant to their expertise.

MESPI Managing Editor Mekarem Eljamal breaks down the content in the new Essential Readings collections.
 

There was a fourth installment published last month in the Middle East Learn and Teach Series, or MELT, this time dealing with Yemen. 

If you’re not familiar, the MELT series are collections of resources from multidisciplinary perspectives dealing with a particular topic or country. Previous MELT series installments have covered Syria, Palestine, and Iraq.

Carly A. Krakow, who is Managing Editor for Special Projects at Jadaliyya, breaks down the resources found in the new MELT series on Yemen.
 

The MESPI team also published the first three parts in a six-part series of Peer-Reviewed Articles Review on the Arab Uprisings, which present articles concerned with the Arab uprisings published in 2010-2020 from our peer-reviewed articles database. The first part deals with Roots, Causes, and Reflections, and the second part covers Theory and Framing, and the third part deals with Actors and Opposition.

MESPI’s Peer-Reviewed Articles Database Coordinator, Shakeela Omar, shares insights found in the new PRAR series on the Arab Uprisings.
 

NEWTONs


Jadaliyya Co-Editor Maya Mikdashi’s new book titled, “Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon,” is an ethnography of state power and demonstrates how sexuality structures and inflects citizenship, bureaucracy, and the concerns of social movements.  

This book also rethinks the history and experience of the nation state in the Middle East by focusing on war, displacement, and resistance as recursive temporalities. 

Must-Reads


In an exciting two-part roundtable titled “Rethinking Cultural Heritage,” participants discussed the combination of liberal politics of cultural recognition with capitalist co-optation of cultural and national assets.  

The participants addressed questions such as “What does it mean to rescue, preserve, and to render visible heritage beyond such configurations of the contemporary heritage regime? How do we address the importance of preservation in the face of political violence?” They also addressed matters such as the role of language in engaging heritage, and much more.

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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