Live with ASI: Episode 3.2 Digest — October 2022

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Oct 8, 2022

Live with ASI: Episode 3.2 Digest — October 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 MK Smith and Bassam Haddad covered the recent “Landscapes of Insecurity” conference by Security in Context, a panel on the ongoing anti-government protests in Iran, several new books by ASI team members on topics such as football in the Middle East, sexuality and state power in Lebanon, and prosecuting the US government’s use of torture, pedagogy, new texts out now, and must-read recommendations.

The episode also featured engaging interviews with Omar S. Dahi, Manijeh Moradian, Catherine Sameh, Lisa Hajjar, Abdullah Al-Arian, and Nadya Sbaiti.

Landscapes of Insecurity Conference


In mid-September, ASI’s partner Security in Context and the University of Oklahoma Center for Peace and Development held the inaugural Landscapes of Insecurity conference in Oklahoma City. The goal was to bring together like minded individuals who are committed to social justice, bottom up development, and cross-disciplinary work by creating a cross-regional exchange. 

The conferences strove to strengthen the idea of a Security in Context “network,” and allowed the participants to share their research, brainstorm, and create concrete research themes and projects. 

Project Director of Security in Context and Professor of Economics at Hampshire College, Omar S. Dahi, explained why it was necessary to hold this conference to strengthen the Security in Context “network,” and essential threads that permeated the weekend’s program.
 

In Her Name: Women Rising, State Violence, and the Future of Iran 


Last week, Jadaliyya’s Iran Page held an event titled “In Her Name,” which was a conversation with scholars of Iran and its diasporas to discuss the current anti-government protests there. The speakers contextualized the protests within the broader struggle for women's rights in Iran and transnational feminist movements. 

The event was co-moderated by Bassam and professor of Anthropology at William and Mary, Negar Razavi. The discussion was as incisive as it was timely, and gave proper context to the protests that are mostly missing from mainstream discourse.

The Iran Page’s Manijeh Moradian and Catherine Sameh, who were both participants in the panel event, share a few of the insights from the discussion, speaking to the context of feminist organizing under the Iranian government and the current political moment.
 

The War in Court by Lisa Hajjar

 

The team covered an exciting book coming out by a beloved ASI team member, Lisa Hajjar, who is a Jadaliyya Co-Editor and Professor of Sociology at University of California-Santa Barbara. Lisa’s new book from University of California Press, titled “The War in Court: Inside the Long Fight against Torture,” traces the fight against US torture policy by lawyers who brought the "war on terror" into courts. 

This book outlines why challenges to the policy of torture had to be waged on the legal terrain, and why hundreds of lawyers joined the fight and were able to force the government to change the way prisoners were treated and focused attention on state crimes perpetrated in the shadows.

Lisa Hajjar shares her motivations for writing her new book and why it is important to recount the legal battle against the US government’s use of torture in the War on Terror, as well as why the book was written as a suspenseful story. 
 

Football in the Middle East


The team covered another book by an ASI team member, co-editor of Jadaliyya’s Critical Currents in Islam Page, Abdullah Al-Arian, who published his book from Hurst Publishers titled, “Football in the Middle East: State, Society, and the Beautiful Game.” Last week, ASI co-sponsored a lecture where Abdullah addresses some of the questions found in the book.

This book examines the complex questions raised by the phenomenon of football as a significant cultural force in the Middle East, as well as its linkages to broader political and socioeconomic processes. It also introduces original research questions that promise to open new directions for the study of football in the Middle East.

Abdullah Al-Arian shares what examining the sport of football can explain regarding the current political moment in the Middle East, and in what ways the study of the sport is currently lacking.
 

Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State in Lebanon


Maya Mikdashi, who is a co-founding Editor at Jadaliyya and Associate Professor at Rutgers University, recently published her first book, “Sextarianism: Sovereignty, Secularism, and the State” in Lebanon from Stanford University Press.

A couple of days ago, Bassam co-moderated an event with Maya where she discussed how her book theorizes the relationships between sexual difference and political difference, the religious and the secular, and law, bureaucracy, and biopower. The book demonstrates how political difference is entangled with religious, secular, and sexual difference, and offers a new way to understand state power.

Nadya Sbaiti, who co-moderated the event with Bassam, speaks on the significance of Maya’s arguments in her book, and how the book challenges dominant discourse on state power in the region. 
 

Pedagogy


The Middle East Studies Pedagogy team has published a new installment of the Engaging Book series. For those that don’t know, Engaging Books is a monthly series featuring new and forthcoming books in Middle East Studies from publishers around the globe. Each installment highlights a trending topic in the MENA publishing world and includes excerpts from the selected volumes.

This month’s installment involves a selection from University of Texas Press on the theme of Emerging Voices in the Middle East. It discusses five books from up-and-coming writers in the region, including novels, poetry anthologies, short fiction collections, and historical fiction.  

NEWTONs

 

Ashjan Ajour’s “Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes: Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body,” seeks to articulate the hunger striker’s own philosophy of freedom and the weaponization of their bodies. The book argues that the hunger strikers, in their interaction with the dispossession of the colonial power, invent “technologies of the self” to challenge and transcend the colonial power.

Elleni Centime Zeleke and Arash Davari recently co-edited a special issue of the journal, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East. They also co-wrote the introduction, titled “Third World Historical: Rethinking Revolution from Ethiopia to Iran,” where they look at the revolutionary history of both countries and attempt to answer the question, “How can we imagine a project that is equally anti-colonial and anti-imperialist while also enacting a commitment to democracy?”

Must-Reads


In a piece titled, “Contested Heritage: Paul Bowles and the Making of Music of Morocco,” Benjamin Jones problematizes the decades-old ethno-musicological survey by writer Paul Bowles to “save” Amazigh folk culture and music.  

Jones demonstrates how Bowle’s attempts were steeped in an orientalist and exploitative perception of the region, and is something that requires redress by institutions such as the Library of Congress.

Jadaliyya’s Arabic page published another installment of the “On This Day” series, which is a collaboration with the Lebanese Assafir newspaper. This installment marks 11 years since 9/11, and features articles pulled from Assafir’s archives covering the attacks, their aftermath, and the effect on Arabs and the region. 

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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