Gaza in Context: A Collaborative Teach-In Series
Aesthetics of Return
Palestinian Poetry
Featuring:
Fady Joudah
Moderator:
Fida Adely
Bassam Haddad
Join us as we discuss Fady Joudah's new poetry collection, [ ... ], as it relates to the Palestinian aesthetic in engaging the world and how the poems came about in a time of genocide, and continue to come forth. We will also discuss some of Darwish's final pieces which coincided with the earliest Israeli wars on Gaza in 2006-7, collected in his last book, The Trace of the Butterfly which exists in English as A River Dies of Thirst.
Read Fady Joudah's new poetry collection, [...], here.
Gaza in Context Collaborative Teach-In Series
We are together experiencing a catastrophic unfolding of history as Gaza endures a massive invasion of genocidal proportions. This accompanies an incessant bombardment of a population increasingly bereft of the necessities of living in response to the Hamas attack in Israel on October 7. The context within which this takes place includes a well-coordinated campaign of misinformation and the unearthing of a multitude of essentialist and reductionist discursive tropes that dehumanize Palestinians as the culprits, despite a context of structural subjugation and Apartheid, now a matter of consensus in the human rights movement.
The co-organizers below are convening weekly teach-ins and conversations on a host of issues that introduce our common university communities, educators, researchers, and students to the history and present of Gaza, in context.
Co-Organizers: Arab Studies Institute, Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, George Mason University’s Middle East and Islamic Studies Program, Rutgers Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Birzeit University Museum, Harvard’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Brown University’s Center for Middle East Studies, University of Chicago’s Center for Contemporary Theory, Brown University’s New Directions in Palestinian Studies, Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies, Georgetown University-Qatar, American University of Cairo’s Alternative Policy Studies, Middle East Studies Association’s Global Academy, University of Chicago’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies, CUNY’s Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center, University of Illinois Chicago’s Arab american cultural Center, George Mason University’s AbuSulayman’s Center for Global Islamic Studies, University of Illinois Chicago’s Critical Middle East Studies Working Group, George Washington University’s Institute for Middle East Studies, Columbia University’s Center for Palestine Studies, New York University’s Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
Featuring
Fady Joudah has published six collections of poetry and six volumes of poetry in translation from the Arabic. He has received numerous awards: The Yale Series for Younger Poets, The Griffin International Poetry prize, a Guggenheim Fellow ship, among others. His newest poetry collection, [...], composed during the first three months of the Israeli genocide in Gaza is now available from Milkweed Editions.
Fida Adely (Moderator) is an Assistant Professor at Georgetown University and the holder of the Clovis and Hala Maksoud Chair in Arab Studies. Fida is an anthropologist whose research and teaching interests focus on development, education, labor and gender. She is the author of several articles and as well as Gendered Paradoxes: Educating Jordanian Women in Nation, Faith and Progress (Chicago University Press 2012).
Bassam Haddad (Moderator) is Director of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Program and Associate Professor at the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. He is the author of Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2011) and co-editor of A Critical Political Economy of the Middle East (Stanford University Press, 2021). Bassam is Co-Founder/Editor of Jadaliyya Ezine and Executive Director of the Arab Studies Institute. He serves as Founding Editor of the Arab Studies Journal and the Knowledge Production Project. He is co-producer/director of the award-winning documentary film, About Baghdad, and director of the acclaimed series Arabs and Terrorism. Bassam is Executive Producer of Status Podcast Channel and Director of the Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI). He received MESA's Jere L. Bacharach Service Award in 2017 for his service to the profession. Currently, Bassam is working on his second Syria book titled Understanding The Syrian Tragedy: Regime, Opposition, Outsiders (forthcoming, Stanford University Press).