Book Launch: The Search for Power by Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish

Book Launch: The Search for Power by Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish

Book Launch: The Search for Power by Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Tadween Publishing is excited to announce the near release of The Search for Power (تقنين النظام) by Tania El Khoury and Ziad Abu-Rish.

On a night with a sudden electricity blackout in Beirut, the artist and her historian husband discussed the history of power cuts in Lebanon. Born during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–90), the artist grew up thinking that the problem of electricity in Lebanon began during the war. The historian, however, recalled finding a government document dated 1952 that announced scheduled power outages across Beirut. The two decided to go on a journey to document the history of blackouts in Lebanon. Most were not accessible. The paper trail led them through archives in five different countries. They reached as far back as 1906, when electricity was first introduced to Beirut. They found a transnational story involving businessmen, politicians, warlords, multinational corporations, and colonial powers. They discovered traces of everyday acts of survival, resistance, and sabotage by company workers and electricity users. They decided to trace their steps back and share it in an intimate gathering. The Search for Power is a lecture and interactive installation performance inviting the audience to look into archives, inaccessible knowledge, and a personal quest for revenge. This book contains the performance script, designed archival documents, and reflections by the artist and historian.

في إحدى ليالي بيروت المحكومة بانقطاع الكهرباء المفاجئ، جلست الفنانة وزوجها المؤرخ يناقشان تاريخ انقطاع التيار الكهربائي في لبنان. فالفنانة المولودة في خلال الحرب الأهلية اللبنانية (1975 – 1990) كبرت معتقدة بأن أزمة الكهرباء في لبنان بدأت في الحرب. لكن المؤرخ استذكر العثور على وثيقة حكومية تعود إلى عام 1952 تعلن فيها جداول التقنين المقررة في كافة أنحاء بيروت. عندها، قرر الاثنان الانطلاق في رحلة لتوثيق تاريخ انقطاع التيار الكهربائي في لبنان. كانت معظم المعلومات عن ذلك الانقطاع غير متاحة، لكنهما تتبعا المستندات والأوراق التي قادتهما إلى الغوص في أرشيفات خمسة بلدان مختلفة. وصلا في الزمن حتى عام 1906، عندما حطت الكهرباء في بيروت للمرة الأولى، وعثرا على خيوط قصة عابرة للحدود تشمل رجال أعمال، وسياسيين، وزعماء حر ٍب، وشركات متعددة الجنسيات وقوى استعمارية. اكتشف الاثنان آثار أفعال يومية تشي بالبقاء والمقاومة والتحدي، قام بها عمال شركة الكهرباء ومستهلكوها. "تقنين النظام" هو عرض يتضمن محاضرة وتجهيزاً تفاعلياً يدعو الجمهور إلى النظر في الأرشيفات والمعرفة المحجوبة، وهو في آن معاً مسعى شخصي للثأر. يحتوي هذا الكتاب على سيناريو العرض الأدائي، ووثائق أرشيفية مصممة وتأملات من بنات أفكار الفنانة والمؤرخ

Table of Contents

The Electricity Between Us: An Introduction
by Tania El Khoury

Untitled: An Introduction
by Ziad Abu-Rish

Performance Script

Listing of Archival Documents

Archival Documents

Arabic section

Authors


Tania El Khoury is a live artist creating installations and performances focused on audience interactivity and its politics. She is Distinguished Artist in Residence of Theater and Performance and Director of the Center for Human Rights & the Arts at Bard College, New York. Her work has been presented in multiple languages across six continents. She was a 2019 Soros Art Fellow and the recipient of the Bessies Outstanding Production Award, the International Live Art Prize, the Total Theatre Innovation Award, and the Arches Brick Award. Tania holds a PhD in Performance Studies from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is co-founder of Dictaphone Group in Lebanon.


Ziad Abu Rish is Director of the MA Program in Human Rights & the Arts and Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College. An historian of the modern Middle East and North Africa, his research focuses on state formation, economic development, and popular mobilizations in Lebanon and Jordan. Ziad is the author of “Garbage Politics in Lebanon” (Middle East Report) as well as “Protest, Regime Stability, and State Formation in Jordan” (Beyond the Arab Spring: The Evolving Ruling Bargain). He is also co-editor of The Dawn of the Arab Uprisings: End of An Old Order? (Pluto Press, 2012). Ziad is co-editor of Arab Studies Journal and Jadaliyya e-zine. He holds a PhD in History from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA).

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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