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Tagged: palestine

Disability, Colonialism, and Global History

By Zoe Wineck and Hunadah Al Hariri. The authors start by introducing the field of Global History, explaining its shortcomings regarding epistemic invisibility, and the real-world impact of the field. In the following, they look at how war caused disabilities as a form of colonial subjugation. More specifically, they look at the case of Israel-Palestine and argue that the state of Israel, since its establishment in 1948, has consistently used the maiming of Palestinians as a colonial tool. The history of this practice has been marginalized in historiography but is essential to understanding the conflict today.

a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies

By Hashem Abushama. This essay was the winner of the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize, a project initiated by the Stuart Hall Foundation. The award was presented at the 7th Annual Stuart Hall Public Conversation in March 2024, also organised by the Foundation. The judges said: “We found it to be a powerful, politically important and theoretically nuanced piece of work written in lyrical prose. As a ‘theoretical diary’ that combines memoir, ethnography photography and critical analysis, it took us directly to particular places, evoking the author’s personal experience growing up in a Palestinian refugee camp, carefully historicising the layers of colonial and settler colonialisms of this space, and theorising their relationships to different modes of capitalism.”

On ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ and the War on Palestine: Gender Violence, and the Struggle for Transnational Feminist Solidarity 

By Fatemeh Shams. In this article, the author reflects on seemingly disconnected events, such as “the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban” (2021), the rise of the “Women Life Freedom” Movement in Iran (2022) and the ongoing war in Gaza, under the lens of transnational feminist solidarity.

When Writing Stutters: Adania Shibli and Zeina Halabi in Conversation

Listening to Adania Shibli, one feels herself in the presence of a storyteller like no other. The writer begins by diving into an idea and supplements it with a story in which she summons thinkers and turns them into fictional characters, then casts a light on marginal figures that places them at the core of the historical event. Shibli effortlessly moves between the written and the aural, between abstraction and narration, and she does it ever so playfully, ultimately distilling narrative into theory. A Conversation with Zeina G. Halabi.

Friendship in Dark Times: Fragments on Palestinian, Arab, and Muslim Literatures

By Zahiye Kundos. “Now, as a group of people who are obsessed with the idea that history matters, we can agree that in the last few months, the aforementioned big hopes have been receiving a series of electric shocks. Thereafter, the word ‘return’ and the question mark disappeared, leaving ‘exile’ standing alone, naked on an empty stage. By then, and while becoming perplexed about the title’s orientation and the exact concepts to tackle, our hosts first suggested talking about “Rethinking Jewish Politics: Between Exile and Sovereignty” and then changed it to “Between State and Exile: Rethinking Jewish Politics.”

An Impossible Friendship – Conversation with Sonja Mejcher-Atassi

Sonja Mejcher-Atassi is a professor of Arabic and comparative literature at the American University of Beirut. She is the author of “An Impossible Friendship: Group Portrait, Jerusalem Before and After 1948” (Columbia University Press 2024). In it, she retraces the story of five friends, or a “small ecumenical circle”, who came together in Jerusalem before 1948 and parted ways after a historical caesura. A Conversation with Jacqueline Wagner.

That Was Tomorrow: A Conversation About Arab Imaginaries in Berlin

Syrian writer Rasha Abbas and Palestinian artist Muhammad Jabali, in conversation with Diana Abbani, discuss the evolving dynamics and narratives shaping Berlin, a city once envisioned as an Arab cultural hub. By exploring how Berlin’s cultural landscape has been influenced by migration, identity politics, and recent political changes, emphazizing the need for both imagination and realistic approaches to create more livable cities.

Gaza through a Mother’s Lens

By Zahyie Kundos. Since Gaza was set on fire, once again, I am asking myself: When will I manage to bring myself to language, to carry the duty of recording the apocalyptic scenes of death, and to imagine a way for rebirth thereof? The least of interventions from my safe place in the diaspora: bringing self to letters. Imagine. But I haven’t been able to, and I am troubled to understand why not. Why is the distance between myself and the act of translating feelings into letters so big this time?

Ethics of Listening to the Silence: Voices, Archives, and the Unspoken Past

By Himmat Zoubi. In recent decades, critical intellectual trends have achieved significant breakthroughs in analyzing the relationship between power and knowledge, as well as in analyzing the dynamics between dominant and marginalized groups. These trends have led to profound debates about the production of history, emphasizing the need to consider the identity of the producers of history, the perspectives of those recording history, methods of reconstructing the past, ways of framing the present, the selection and availability of sources, and techniques of historical revision.

The No-State Solution

In this article, the Palistinian sociologist Mohammed A. Bamyeh, outlines a “No-State Solution” to the area between the Jordan river and the Mediterranean Sea. This “No-State Solution” was discussed at an event on January 28, 2024, hosted by a number of local institutions in Victoria, Canada by the author and Israeli political scientist Uri Gordon. The idea of no-state was understood to foreground the virtues of free association, multiple loyalties, and uncoerced order — all as counterweights to centralized control, militarized states, fanatic loyalties, and permanent mobilization of populations.