Call for Papers: Intellectual Histories of Decolonization in the Maghreb

Call for Papers: Intellectual Histories of Decolonization in the Maghreb

Call for Papers: Intellectual Histories of Decolonization in the Maghreb

By : Jadaliyya Reports

AMERICAN INSTITUTE FOR MAGHRIB STUDIES (AIMS) DIRECTOR’S WORKSHOP

 

Call for Papers  –  دعوة للمشاركة -  Appel à Contribution

 

Intellectual Histories of Decolonization in the Maghreb

   لتاريخ الفكري لأنهاء الاستعمار في المغرب العربي

Histoire intellectuelle de la décolonisation au Maghreb 


Tunis, 9-10 December 2023

Organized by Muriam Haleh Davis (University of California, Santa Cruz), Max Weiss (Princeton University) and Robert P. Parks (Centre d’Études Maghrébines en Algérie)

 English:


This interdisciplinary workshop will explore how intellectuals across the Middle East and North Africa have reckoned with the multiple legacies of colonial rule, with a particular focus on the relationship between movements in the Mashreq and Maghreb. We invite participants to reflect on modern intellectual histories of the region– especially the experience of decolonization – in terms of connections, ruptures, and comparison. 

This workshop will foster a series of informal conversations, bringing the rich intellectual histories of the Maghreb and the Mashreq together into a single analytical frame. In addition to scholarly research, we also invite personal reflections on how intellectuals have understood the past, present, and possible futures of the region both during and beyond decolonization.

Thematic panels at this workshop invite scholars and intellectuals to reflect on a number of topics, including (but not limited to):

  • Histories of publishing, translation, and knowledge production
  • Decolonization in national, regional, and global perspectives
  • Diasporic formations and/or networks in exile
  • Aesthetics, politics, literature, and the arts
  • Political solidarities, past and present
  • Arab nationalisms, East and West

Invited participants will be notified by 30 August 2023. They will be asked to pre-circulate a relevant published text of their choosing (not necessarily one they have authored) by 15 September 2023. The workshop will be held in Tunis from 9-10 December 2023. Airfare and accommodation for all participants will be covered by the organizers. The languages of the workshop will be English, French, and Arabic.

We invite scholars at all stages of their careers to submit a short abstract and c.v. no later than 15 August 2023. Please send them to IntellectualHistoriesDecol@gmail.com.

العربية:


هذه الورشة متعددة التخصصات ستحلل التحديات المتنوعة التي يوجهها المفكرون في الشرق الأوسط  وشمال أفريقيا بعد هيمنة الاستعمار، و سوف تركز على العلاقة بين المشرق والمغرب. ندعو المشاركين للنظر في التاريخ الفكري في المنطقة – خاصة في فترة مناهضة الاستعمار- بالنظر إلى الروابط والانفصالات والمقارنات.   

هذه الورشة ستتكون من محادثات متعددة وعامة حول التاريخ  الفكري الغني في المشرق و المغرب في إطار تحليلي واحد. تعرض هذه الورشة البحوث الأكاديمية و نرحب بالملاحظات الشخصية  حول هذا الموضوع و فهم المثقفين للماضي و الحاضر و تنبؤهم للمستقبل في المنطقة خلال فترة مناهضة الاستعمار و بعدها.  

الجلسات خلال هذه الورشة  ستجمع الباحثين و المفكرين لتحليل عدد من المواضيع، بما في ذلك:

  • تاريخ النشر، الترجمة، وإنتاج المعرفة
  • فترة  مناهضة الاستعمار من منظور إقليمي، ووطني، وعالمي
  • مجتمعات الشتات و شبكات المنفى
  • التضامن السياسي في الماضي والوقت الحاضر
  • الوطنية العربية في المشرق والمغرب

المشاركون المقبولون سيتم إعلامهم قبل ٣٠ أغسطس. سنطلب منهم إرسال نص عن موضوع الورشة (من أي كاتب) قبل ١٥ سبتمبر. الورشة ستعقد في تونس من ٩ الى١٠ ديسمبر. تقبل نصوص الورشة باللغات الإنجليزية، الفرنسية و العربية و يدار النقاش بها. تذاكر السفر والإقامة على حساب المنظمين.

ندعو الباحثين في مختلف درجاتهم في البحث العلمي (باحث دكتوراه، أستاذ جامعي إلى آخره…) ليرسلوا ملخصا قصيرا من مخطط اقتراحهم و نسخة من سيرهم الذاتية إلى IntellectualHistoriesDecol@gmail.com  قبل ١٥ أغسطس ٢٠٢٣.

Français :


Cet atelier interdisciplinaire explorera les manières dont les intellectuels au Moyen Orient et en Afrique du Nord ont fait face aux legs multiples de la domination coloniale, en se focalisant sur le rapport entre le Machrek et le Maghreb. Nous invitons les participants à réfléchir aux histoires intellectuelles modernes de la région dans un cadre comparatif, tout particulièrement aux expériences de la décolonisation, et des connexions et ruptures qui caractérisent ce moment.

La rencontre stimulera une série de réflexions informelles sur diverses trajectoires et débats intellectuels au Maghreb et au Machrek dans un même cadre historique et analytique. Parallèlement aux travaux scientifiques, nous invitons également les réflexions personnelles -et autobiographiques- sur la façon dont les intellectuels ont compris le passé, présent, et les futurs possibles promis à la région (au sens large) pendant et après la décolonisation.

Les sessions thématiques de l’atelier seront consacrées à différents sujets, y compris mais non limités aux suivants :

  • Les histoires de l’édition, la traduction, et la production des savoirs
  • La décolonisation dans les perspectives nationales, régionales et globales 
  • Les formations diasporique et/ou les réseaux en exil
  • L’esthétique, la politique, la littérature et les arts
  • Les solidarités politiques au passé et au présent
  • Les nationalismes arabes, à l’Est et à l’Ouest

Les participants sélectionnés seront informés avant le 30 août 2023. Ils seront invités à faire circuler un texte déjà publié qu’ils jugent pertinent pour la thématique du colloque avant le 15 septembre 2023. Le workshop aura lieu à Tunis du 9-10 décembre 2023. Les billets d’avion et une chambre d’hôtel seront pris en charge par les organisateurs. Les langues du workshop seront l’anglais, le français, et l’arabe.

Nous invitons des chercheurs à tous les stades de leur carrière à nous envoyer une courte proposition d’intervention et un CV avant le 15 août 2023 à l’adresse électronique suivante: IntellectualHistoriesDecol@gmail.com.

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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