IN ALPHABETICAL ORDER BY FIRST NAME
Abida Younas: Narratives of Post-Arab Spring Literature: Towards Making Minor Literature
Abstract: My research reads contemporary Post-Arab Spring Anglo-Arab writings through the critical-theoretical framework of Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari’s conception of minor literature. Deleuze and Guattari derive their theory of minor literature from an analysis of western writings. Applying the same theory uncritically in the context of Anglo-Arab literature would be limiting and restrictive, I believe. My study revisits theory of minor literature and reformulate it according to the emerging literature. My research contends that contemporary post-Arab spring writings exhibit a mode of linguistic experimentation, one that is uniquely contemporary to the field of Anglo-Arab writing. I argue that contemporary writings enact the minor practice of linguistic deterritorialization, through their metaphors, their adoption of modernist and postmodernist strategies and through their incorporation of contemporaneous modes of protest including popular slogans, tweets, and chants – customarily not associated with minor literature. While it is too early to discern definitively the characteristics of Post-Arab Spring literature, my research is a contribution to developing a critical-theoretical framework suited to the analysis of Post-Arab Spring literature.
Ahlam Muhtaseb (with Rana Sharif & Naim Aburaddi): Censorship and Disruptions: The Case of Palestinian Resistance Online
Drawing on postcolonial critical theory and cultural studies approaches, we examine efforts by Palestinian social media activists in centering Palestinian narratives online. In addition, our efforts pay particular attention to methods used to censor their online engagement by dominant social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Clubhouse. These online users, who had a modest following, increased in their online engagement and followers in the aftermath of the May 2021 uprisings. Thus, as a point of departure, we analyze censorship against Palestinian-related, user-generated content during the Jerusalem and Gaza uprisings in May of 2021. Furthermore, despite attempts to quell online engagement and silence Palestinian voices online, we also examine the creative ways in which Palestinian activists and their supporters were able to, and continue to, resist the hegemonic controlling practices of social media conglomerates. We are motivated by the following research questions: RQ1: In which ways have Palestinian activists and their allies centered the Palestinian narrative on social media outlets like Facebook and Instagram during the latest struggles in Palestine? RQ2: What practices have social media outlets been using to censor Palestinian and pro-Palestinian voices during the Sheikh Jarrah, Aqsa, and Gaza struggles? RQ2: How have Palestinian activists and their supporters responded to the attempts by social media corporates to silence their voices? In an attempt to capture the breadth and depth of Palestinian engagement online, we have been focusing on the three main cornerstones of cultural studies: 1. Analyzing the messages and the actual steps taken by activists on social media themselves (from analysis of interviews with individuals committed to a Palestinian presence online such as Mona Hawa and Nadeem Nashef ), 2. Analyzing the political economy of production of social media activism, focusing on the role of social media corporates in silencing Palestinian voices, and 3. Analyzing the role of audiences in carrying out the messages and interacting with the activists.
Ali Musleh: Troubling the Facts on the Ground: Meditations on War as Media
This paper is a meditation on Israeli invocations of “making facts on the ground” to legitimize and securitize settler colonial war. Marrying critical visual theory, phenomenology, theories of time, and martial theory, it proceeds through staging a juxtaposition between the Ink Flag photograph captured by Zionist forces in 1949 to communicate the establishment of the Israeli state as a fact on the ground and the sealing of the Palestinian Nakba and a photograph captured in 2014 of a aerial drone drawing an infinity sign in the skies of Gaza. What I aim to show is how forms of war are deployed as media that splinter the factual interiority of the Israeli state from its disavowed actuality to produce a multiplicity of truth-claims, chief among them is the existence of a self-contained Jewish majority state. Thinking war as media, I argue, puts us in confrontation with the capacity of power for metamorphosis and the consequences of its ability to form, reform and transform for the witnessing and conceptualizing gaze. What is revealed in the process is how media reportage puts into play the efficacy of violence as a mode of truth-claiming. In closing, I suggest that scholars ought to consider settler sovereignty as a groundless, self-altering motion of war that only contingently anchors itself in mediating performances of violence against the Indigenous.
Alohalani Brown (double session with Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
Cynthia Franklin: BDS and Building Solidarity
Abstract to be published soon
Cynthia Franklin (double session with Alohalani Brown, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
Ece Algan: Media censorship in Turkey: Cultural policies and ideological underpinnings of political instrumentalization
Since the middle of 2000s, media capture in Turkey has been achieved through significant structural changes in the media, such as expropriation of media outlets, and regulations aimed at making the restructuring permanent as well as various methods of surveillance, censorship, intimidation and control in areas where restructuring efforts failed the regime. Through an analysis of media capture in Turkey with a focus on the state surveillance and repressive governance of its press, television and social media, I will examine the cultural policies and ideological tropes used in order to justify the systemic capture in the service of the current government in the past 20 years. Latest media closures following the failed coup attempt of 2016, broadcast bans, jailing of journalists, curtailment of citizens’ speech freedoms on social media, press freedom violations and the deployment of digital counter governmental propaganda all constitute the integral mechanisms of a larger and orchestrated media capture aimed at stifling dissent and strengthening AKP’s hegemonic power. This latest wave of media capture will be evaluated within Turkey’s larger historical and sociopolitical context where media outlets have been regarded as a legitimate and necessary tool of government propaganda for nation building rather than a watchdog that keeps the government in check.
Enaya Othman: Nationalism and Fashion: The Preservation, Transformation, and Politicization of Palestinian Dress
This paper discusses the different ways Palestinian women have engaged in preserving, collecting, memorializing, and politicizing the Palestinian traditional garb since 1948. Through a historical discussion and analyses of contemporary forms of female activism, the paper looks into Palestinian cultural clothing as a means of nationalist and feminist activism as well as a material cultural object. From the individual attempts to collect and preserve the traditional style and embroidery in the refugee camps following the displacement of Palestinians since 1948 to the transnational attempts in recent decades to revitalize cultural dress as an expression of political, national, and cultural identity, the paper discusses Palestinian women’s reinterpretation of the cultural dress functioning as an empowering tool for agency and creativity that rearranges power structure while reproducing home culture. Palestinian women in their homeland and in the USA bring together the traditional and modern gear in a way that contests Orientalism and gender-related power structures simultaneously. It also serves to affirm their group membership to the Palestinian community by promoting their imagined nation’s symbol. Drawing on extensive historical research as well as community observation and interviews with Palestinian women who engage in the revitalization and promotion of traditional dress as wearers, designers, and entrepreneurs, the paper explores various dimensions and meanings ascribed to traditional dress across decades. Ultimately, women’s activities surrounding the cultural dress offers a window into diverse ways women approach, contest, or transform diverse coexisting and competing dynamics -such as nationalism, modernism, Orientalism, anti-Orientalism, and Islamism.
Fouad Moughrabi: Examination of shifts in American public opinion on the Southwest Asian and North African Region
This presentation will examine American public opinion data on the Middle East in order to find out whether some shifts have occurred, in which direction and among which specific groups. I will aslo examine possible influences on policy making.
Gaby Semaan: The Role of FM Radio Stations in Creating a Space for Civil Public Discourse during and following the Years of Civil War in Lebanon
Media plays an important role in forming and shaping the public discourse. Such discourse could be highly interrupted during times of war and civil conflicts. This session explains how privately owned Frequency Modulation (FM) stations during the latter half of 1980s and 1990s in Lebanon created a space for civil public discourse amid a politically, demographically and even geographically divided country. This presentation will take its audience through a modern historical journey into the “Land of the Cedars” outlining the intricate lines that shapes up Lebanon’s complex demographic and geopolitical-scapes. By providing a brief yet detailed blueprint of the media-scape of the country, he will discuss the social, political and economic factors that contributed to shaping it from its conception until the beginning of the 21st Century. The presenter will argue that privately owned FM radio stations during the late 80s and throughout the 90s created a space for civil public discourse when the AM radio stations, and other written, TV and satellite media outlets, that were owned by political parties were not the ideal space for creating such a unifying civil public discourse. The presenter will connect how social media outlets today can play the same role. The democratization of media, local FM stations or Social Media platforms provide a powerful and unadulterated opportunity for citizens to express their outrage to violence, division and corruption. The presenter will discuss how this particular phenomenon could nowadays be a model for different war-torn countries of the region.
Ghada Mourad: Examination of Omar Youssef Suleiman’s novel: The Last Syrian
This paper examines Omar Youssef Suleiman’s novel Le dernier Syrien or The Last Syrian, that I translated from French. This novel narrates the early days of the Syrian revolution—before it was violently repressed by the state and appropriated by the Islamists—through the eyes of a group of young Syrians dreaming of a world free of oppressive traditions, restrictive religions, and dictatorial regimes. The Last Syrian belongs to the new generation of Arabic writing in which the virtual interrupts the linear narrative, young characters use VPN to meet on dating sites, the legitimacy of the novel as a genre is questioned at the same time as the young protesters undermine the established regime, opening the space for a new episteme that, despite repression, carries its promises through the text. This novel’s vignettes are interrupted by email exchanges between Mohammed and Youssef, two young men experimenting with their sexuality and, like the rest of the novel’s characters, waging their own revolutions. As the characters end up defeated and disillusioned, Youssef reveals the main reason for their failure: “Our families do not accept us for who we are; for that, we would have to be mere reproductions of them. We will be persecuted because of our difference.” The novel’s ending circles back to its first sentence to signal that “this is an old story” about inter-generational conflicts, rebellion, and emancipation. It is about the indomitable yearning for freedom that, despite all the obstacles and setbacks, will keep reemerging until it succeeds.
Healoha Johnston (with Reem Bassous): Nomadic and Shaped by the Land: Role of media and popular culture
Elif Shafak describes herself as a person of “multiple belongings,” an accumulation of places and affiliations in her 2020 text, How to Stay Sane in an Age of Division. In our proposed presentation, Bassous and Johnston will consider artwork and scholarship by South West Asia North Africa (SWANA), Arab American, and Kānaka ʻŌiwi (Native Hawaiian) women artists to open up the phenomenon of being shaped by the land(s) in a process of rooting and re-rooting oneself across spaces. Many artists are maintaining their sense of belonging by establishing relationships with the land upon which they live, and have previously lived, in solidarity with original stewards of those places. Our research borrows Rowa Nabil’s terminology of “the glocal,” a mashup of global and local, suggesting that the “quintessential intercultural exchange between the ‘local’ and ‘global’ shapes identities.” As such, the term “Arab region” expands beyond borders, and so too does the Indigenous experience. It is within the glocal that Bassous and Johnston will discuss overlapping connections between what are perceived as disparate experiences–that of Indigenous SWANA and Pacific Islander women artists and writers who have remained in their homeland, and women artists and writers whose genealogy connects them to these regions though they now live elsewhere.
Ibrahim Aoude: U.S. Dominance, Decline, and the Role of West Asia in Global Politics
Ibrahim G. Aoudé is Professor Emeritus of ethnic studies at the University of Hawai‘i—Mānoa and the Editor of Arab Studies Quarterly (ASQ), a peer-reviewed journal published by Pluto Journals. He is on the Board of Editors of Janus Unbound, published by Memorial University of Newfoundland. He has a Ph. D. in political science and has authored dozens of refereed articles and book chapters, A book on the Lebanese civil war, edited three volumes, and conducted field work in multiple foreign destinations and in Hawai‘i. Professor Aoudé has attended numerous national and international conferences and served on several conference organizing committees. He served as chair at the Department of Ethnic Studies for a total of 13 years.
‘Ihilani Lasconia (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
‘Ilima Long (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
Isis Nusair: Qalam Humra and the Body of War
This paper analyzes the 2014 Syrian television series, Qalam Humra. The series was written by Yam Mashhadi and directed by Hatem Ali. It depicts five years in the life of the main character Ward (Sulafa Memar), who is a screenwriter living in Damascus before and after the start of the 2011 Syrian revolution. The series traces the social and political changes in the lives of Ward and her middle class family and friends. Using an intersectional, feminist and queer approaches, I examine how power relations are depicted in the series, and the space they create for critical and transformative perspectives. By tracing the intersectionality between class, gender, ethnicity and sexuality, I show the spectrum of relations represented, and how they employ a variety of allegories and metaphors to challenge social norms especially in regard to gender and sexual orientation. I trace in particular how the series challenges the representations of women as symbols of the purity of the nation, and analyze how women’s bodies become sites for contested power relations. The series uses memory, at times real or hallucinatory, to trace the continuum of these past and present relations and traumas. Ward is imprisoned and tortured by the Syrian regime and many of the scenes depict her lying in a tiny cell, writing on the wall, or talking to other real or imaginary prisoners. The analysis of the body of war in this series traces literal and metaphoric contestations and crossings that have the potential to form subversive and oppositional consciousness. I end by tracing the political economy of the production of this series outside Syria and the implications of its censorship.
Jamal Nassar: Palestine After the Crossroads
Keynote Speech
Khawla Obo Othman: Characteristics of the three phases of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry
This study examines the work of one of the twentieth century’s foremost cultural figures, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008). The concept of post-Nakba and Naksa literature maps the critical developments in evaluations of Arabic literature and, more particularly, Palestinian literature. This study will explore the characteristics of the three phases of Darwish’s poetry. The theme of identity is common in all of Darwish’s work, a concern which was motivated by his personal experiences of forced separation from the Palestinian homeland, the experience of living as an exile outside the land of his birth throughout most of his life, his continuous travel to different countries and his dream of returning to Palestine. Darwish’s poetic work can be divided chronologically and thematically into three main stages. The first of these stages is the “homeland stage,” which covers his earliest period of writing, the years when, for the most part, Darwish was still residing in his occupied homeland. This ended in 1969. Then there was a significant shift in the second stage with the appearance of exile, which became a major theme in his poetry. This phase starts and ends with a departure, the first being his change of residence from Palestine to Lebanon in 1973 post Naksa and the second being his forced exodus from Beirut in 1982, following Israel’s invasion of Lebanon. He was disappointed by the inaction of Arab nations. In the third and final phase of his poetry, it is possible to discern a change in emphasis from his overtly political Palestinian themes towards work which has a more personal focus and foregrounds issues relating to “self-identity,” which is linked to national identity. The start of this final stage was marked by his migration to Paris where Darwish lived for ten years. Theoretically, this study will apply postcolonial concepts to Darwish’s work, especially Edward Said’s ideas on exile and Late Style. In addition to Said’s ideas, Edward Soja’s concept of Third Space will be used to highlight Darwish’s poetics of space, which integrate the political, social, and historical. This is an analytical study of the literary, social and cultural development that can be discerned in Darwish’s poetry.
Laila Mourad: Egyptian Sha'bi (popular) women singers: (re)envisioning women’s resistance, subjectivity, and collective cultural consciousness
Popular Egyptian (sha’bi) music consists of both rural folk songs and contemporary urban renditions. During Egypt’s postcolonial nationalist era (1950s-1970s) sha’bi singers were predominantly from lower-income backgrounds, especially women sha’bi singers who were mostly from rural regions (Abdel-Nabi et.al, 2004). In contrast to orientalist colonial constructions of rural Egyptian women as passive, oppressed and docile non-subjects (Taha & Salem, 2019) women sha’bi singers emerge as iconic, powerful, and bold symbols of Egyptian womanhood and culture. Inspired by Black feminists (Davis, 1990; Hill-Collins, 2000) who demonstrate how Blue’s music enabled Black women to voice their lived experiences, resist their objectification, and build community resistance through self-expression; I explore how Egyptian women sha’bi singers’ performances challenged dominant colonial and modern state feminist narratives that marginalized rural women and invisiblized their role in cultural liberation struggles. I conduct a visual and discourse analysis of popular songs performed by sha’bi woman singer Gamalat Shiha, to examine what enabled her to be accepted, respected, and heard by her male audiences in various social settings. I argue that through using everyday social practices and tools, such as storytelling, emotional expressions, and traditional modest clothing, women sha’bi singers were able to participate in public art performances that centered their everyday social, political, and economic struggles and lived experiences. Women sha’bi singers subverted dominant societal norms and disrupted gender and class boundaries, which enabled them to reclaim their agency, and transform public performances to potential sites for (re)envisioning women’s resistance, subjectivity, and collective cultural consciousness (Fanon, 1963).
Laila Shikaki: Afro-Arabs and Poetry: Safia Elhillo as a Case Study
This paper looks at the case of Safia Elhillo as one example of an emerging, representative Afro-Arab poet in the diaspora. It discusses how Elhillo’s use of poetry as a means of documentation helps in constructing an identity through using language, not only as a creative outlet but as a tool for identity building through the mixing of Arabic and English words, personal narration, and the dependency on Sudanese traditions and culture. This identity construction mirrors identity formation and representation of other people of color, especially Afro-Latinx women. In so doing, the paper briefly explores Elhillo’s life, her works, and commentaries regarding issues of identity while living in the United State, but it mainly focuses on her poetry. Elhillo’s recent collection of poetry The January Children (2017) will also be used as my main artifact. The purpose of this paper, thus, is to create a link between Afro-Latinx women and Afro-Arab women in how both use genres of literatures (in a broad sense) in order to come to terms with their multi-faceted identities.
Maan Odeh (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
Malia Hulleman (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see below under Rabab Abdulhadi
Mary Abowd: Atavism and Modernity in Time's Portrayal of the Arab World, 2001-2011
This study builds on research that has documented the persistence of negative stereotypes of Arabs and the Arab world in the U.S. media during more than a century. The specific focus is Time magazine's portrayal of Arabs and their societies between 2001 and 2011, a period that includes the September 11, 2001, attacks; the ensuing U.S.-led "war on terror" and the mass "Arab Spring" uprisings that spread across the Arab world beginning in late 2010. Using a mixed-methods approach, the study explores whether and to what extent Time's coverage employs what Said (1978) called Orientalism, a powerful binary between the West and the Orient characterized by a consistent portrayal of the West as superior--rational, ordered, cultured--and the Orient as its opposite--irrational, chaotic, depraved. A quantitative content analysis of 271 Time feature stories and photographs revealed that Time's coverage focused predominately on conflict, violence, and dysfunction. Nations that received the most frequent coverage were those where the United States was involved militarily, such as Iraq, as well as those that receive the most U.S. foreign aid or are strategically important to U.S. interests. These findings coalesce with the study's qualitative portion, a critical discourse analysis of approximately 20 percent of the data set that employs metaphor and framing theory. This thread of the study reveals an overarching Orientalist binary where Arabs are portrayed either as "atavistic"; or "modern."
Miko Peled: Challenging Zionism
Since 1948 Palestine has been governed by brutal a brutal apartheid regime and it is the call of our generation to end it. We need challenge the Zionist - biblical narrative which presents Palestine as "The Land of Israel" and demonstrate clearly that "Israel" is in fact occupied Palestine. We know based on the work of historian Nur Maslaha that the name Palestine has been used to describe that country going back close to 4000 years. We know that in the 18th century under the leadership of Dhaher Al-Umar Palestine became an economic powerhouse trading with England and France, exporting olive oil, cotton and even barley grown by the Palestinian Beduin in the Naqab. However, the history, ancient, modern and the one being created before our very eyes is distorted by the Zionist organization around the world. Connecting the actual history of Palestine with the future that needs to be secured for it and its people, is the key to ending this sad chapter in the story of Palestine.
Naim Aburradi (with Ahlam Muhtaseb & Rana Sharif): Please see above under Ahlam Muhtaseb
Noha Atef: Meanings of the Hijab in Egyptian Television Dramas, 2016–2021
In a country like Egypt with a Muslim majority, the hijab (veil) has been commonly worn by Muslim women since the 1980s, but it seldom appeared in television dramas, except when worn by elderly women. But after the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in 2012, more head-covered characters began to appear on TV screens. In 2017, the billboards for Ramadan dramas (the high season for soap operas during the holy month of Ramadan) were full of women wearing a hijab, such as the superstar Yusura and Mai Ezzeldin and Riham Abdel Ghafour, two well-known actresses who wore a hijab in their respective soap operas. Ever since then, the hijab has become more prominent in television dramas. The rise of more actresses wearing a hijab is not a reaction to a current religious trend as, in fact, more women are taking off their hijab. The prominence of the hijab is also not a tendency to be modest because many dramas have actresses wearing the hijab while other actresses are wearing more revealing clothes. The hijab is generally being used as an accessory to denote the wearers’ qualities, social classes, and ideology. Through physical, psychological, and moral analyses of 15 hijab-wearing actresses in Egyptian serial dramas between 2016 and 2021, this paper answers the following questions: What meanings are provided by the hijab in Egyptian dramas? How is the hijab used to express social status, ideologies, personal traits, and religious opinions?
Nour Aladdin: Southwest Asia and North African Queer literature: Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Hasan Namir’s God in Pink
My paper seeks to examine whether twenty-first-century Middle Eastern queer literature can be analyzed through classic Western queer theories. I am curious if and how a reading of a Middle Eastern text can alter or challenge our perception of queerness in the East and West. To answer the following questions, I analyzed Saleem Haddad’s Guapa and Hasan Namir’s God in Pink. Haddad and Namir, both having shared experiences with being gay in the Middle East, write about fictional queer Arabs coming to terms with their sexuality. I am particularly interested to what degree Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s definitions of the “closet” apply to the novels. Haddad and Namir are responding to the West’s classic theories, but my aim was to determine whether they challenge or satisfy them. I thoroughly researched Middle Eastern politics and history with a focus on homosexuality in Arab culture. Haddad and Namir’s novels are set in political upheavals – the Arab Spring and the 2003 invasion of Iraq respectively; therefore, it is essential to understand the events from the East and West’s perspective as well as how it affected queer Arabs. In addition, I considered Jasbir Puar’s concept of “homonationalism”, a term she coined that investigates the relationship between nationalism, the state, and sexuality. Puar’s research focus on the intersections of “nation” and “sexuality” and will provide a theoretical perspective for analyzing Western queer criticism but will also create vital close readings of the novels. Above all, my aim with this project was not to portray the Middle East or queer Arabs as tragically or inevitably oppressed but instead celebrate and honour the authors’ voices in literature.
Nour Joudah: Nostalgia and imagining the future: engaging in critical acts of remembering and hoping for a free Palestine on social media
Nostalgia and imagining the future are often seen as dichotomously opposed temporalities and spaces. However, with indigenous struggle, engaging in critical acts of remembering becomes an inextricable part of both imagining a future and working to realize it. For the Palestinian experience – like so many Indigenous ones – time is always collapsing in on itself. Palestinian sumoud is not linear; it cannot be traced in an order of events marked past, present, and future. Rather, it is made up of limitless temporalities and lived daily across a vast expanse of spaces. In other words, collective memory, current moment, and collective future imagining are joint and immediate, not opposed and distant. Against the progressive narrative of linear time, spectacles of terror rupture pasts as present and thrust Palestinians to futures in an instant. During May and June 2021, amidst another violent onslaught on Gaza and uprisings in Jerusalem and the 48 territories, Palestinians took a moment to express dreams assuming a liberation already achieved. In the homeland as well as across the diaspora, they went to twitter in Arabic and English to “tweet like it’s free”/ “غرد_كأنها_حرة#”. The tweets map regional travel, returns to Palestine, reunions with family, and much more; however, more prominently than the specifics of movement that would come with freedom, the statements exemplify the simultaneity of experience. Highlighting dozens of these tweets against the backdrop of events on the dates they were posted, a picture emerges of a temporality unconfined by order.
Rabab Abdulhadi: (double session, with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Saliem Shehadeh, Tomomi Kimukawa):
Teaching Palestine: Producing Knowledge for Justice
A double session critically analyzing the pedagogical and intellectual implications of censoring Palestinian and other narratives of gender, justice, and resistance in a virtual open classroom co-organized by professors Rabab Abdulhadi, director and senior scholar of the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies (AMED), and Tomomi Kinukawa, faculty lecturer in Women and Gender Studies (WGS) at San Francisco State University (SFSU). Bringing six classes together, the webinar, "Whose Narratives? Gender, Justice and Resistance: A Conversation with Leila Khaled," scheduled for September 23, 2020, was the first of a two-part series Abdulhadi and Kinukawa put together for fall 2020 focusing on gender and sexual justice in Palestine in a comparative perspective. The second, "Queer Justice Now! Challenging Pinkwashing, White Supremacist, Zionist, and Islamophobic Narratives," was scheduled for October 19th. The two open classrooms replicated a similar series the instructors offered to their classes in spring 2020, immediately following the online conversion of all university instructio due to the pandemic. The online conversion had the unintended consequences. The whole internet was now wide open for AMED open classrooms in contrast with a couple of months earlier when SFSU library cancelled one room for an open classroom on the Day of Remembrance in collaboration with Asian American Studies and Bay Area Japanese communities, and tried to block another on Afro-Palestinians and Black Palestinian solidarity. However, the extensive interest and engagement of thousands around the world in AMED cosponsored webinars led to Zionist social media attacks to silence Palestine and culminated with the censorship of the September 23rd webinar. The first proposed ASQ session will be a panel with papers that will provide a textured ethnographic background to the design, development and shutting down of the September 23rd webinar and shed light on the roles, actions and strategies of different parties who conceptualized the two-part series.
First, panelists will historicize and contextualize the background of how the professors came together to co-design and construct the fall 2020 two-part series on gender and sexual justice in Arab and Muslim communities with a particular focus on Palestine. They will then analyze the nuances and actions of censorship by Israel lobby groups, the university administration, and three private technology giants, Zoom, Facebook, and YouTube, though the nuances of the actions of each Silicon Valley corporation shed light on urgent questions that lie at the heart of tech transparency, privatization, and surveillance. The papers will critically analyze what at the times seems to be a contradictory role of SFSU administration that gave lip service to academic freedom as a public relations strategy, on one hand, while reproducing Islamophobic, Orientalist, Colonialist and Zionist discourses against scholarship, pedagogy and advocacy for justice in/for Palestine that is linked to the indivisibility of justice, on the other. In response to pressure from Zionist groups and individuals, Zoom also canceled the solidarity event on October 23, 2020, which was to feature Kaleikoa Ka‘eo, Ma’an Odah, and Joy Enomoto, over the planned participation of Leila Khaled.
In a similar censorship action to that of San Francisco State University, the University of Hawai'i administration did nothing to protect the rights of free speech and academic freedom for the faculty, students, staff and community. Since the presence of Leila Khaled, an international iconic figure of resistance, led to the censoring of the planned event, organizers planned an alternative event that featured the reading of her words. The organizers planned the video to protest this censorship with the awareness that “it is our voices that could be censored next. We will not be silenced!"
Rana Sharif (with Ahlam Muhtaseb and Naim Aburaddi)
Reem Bassous (with Healoha Johnston)
Rhoda Kanaaneh: The Right Kind of Suffering: Gender, Sexuality and Arab Asylum Seekers in the United States
This paper examines the politics of Arab asylum in the United States, focusing on particular on the experiences of Arab women and Arab gays and lesbians who seek gender or sexuality based asylum. This narrow immigration opening is built on applicants presenting specific forms of suffering and attenuated images of their countries of origin in relation to the U.S. The legal process also requires that they make a complete physical break from their former homes vowing, for example, never to return. I look at how a group of Arab asylum seekers in New York navigate these requirements, and how they dissolve, maintain and strengthen connections to old communities and create and represent new ones locally and transnationally. My analysis is based on anthropological research conducted between 2012- 2018 involving asylum seekers from Egypt, Jordan, Palestine, Sudan and Lebanon.
Safea Altef: Transcultural Identity on social media: common characteristics faced by the Arabic-speaking population
This research paper will dissect the elements that represent the Transcultural Identity on social media. Transcultural Identity here represents common characteristics or struggles faced by the Arabic speaking population. Specifically, the elements and issues that shape the identity of the MENA region. The paper will focus on social media users and the way they express their identities on these platforms. This will be done by analyzing the visual artworks of social media users/artists who share still visual work. The two countries included in this study are Libya and Yemen both of which participated in the 2011 uprisings and are currently experiencing ongoing conflicts. The time frame chosen is between 2015 and 2020 which signifies the start of war in both Libya and Yemen. Furthermore, this paper seeks to look at the connection between the Libyan and Yemeni encoding of visual art, such as common form or subject matter, and common symbols, to understand how the transcultural occurs between the two countries. It does so by analyzing the narrative and representation encodings of three Libyan visual artists and three Yemeni visual artists who use social media as a publication platform using their real names. The encoding analysis focuses on understanding the symbolic system constructed to narrate and represent certain topics and issues which include mobility, women, children, life conditions during the war, media, freedom of expression, and perception of the future.
Sahar Khamis: (Re)Visiting “Cyberactivism” and Arab Resistance in the Diaspora: New Pros and Cons
When the “Arab Spring” uprisings erupted in 2011, the high hopes for democratization were coupled with equally high confidence in the liberating potentials of new media, as viable alternatives to state-controlled media. However, over a decade later, the far from ideal outcomes in post-Arab Spring countries were accompanied by equally disheartening reversals in the role of social media from tools for liberation in the hands of freedom-fighters to tools for repression in the hands of autocratic regimes. This qualitative study investigates the shifting role of “cyberactivism” (Howard 2011), as perceived by a diverse group of Arab activists and journalists in the diaspora, representing different countries, genders, political orientations, and professional affiliations. Through conducting 20 in-depth online interviews, using a snowball sampling technique, the study aims to unpack the complexity of the phenomenon of Arab resistance in the diaspora (Khamis and Fowler 2020), in general, and the potentials and limitations of the deployment of digital tools by Arab diasporic communities to resist autocratic regimes, in particular. The study pays special attention to the rising phenomenon of “digital authoritarianism” (Khamis, 2019), and its varied implications, and it unpacks the overlaps and divergences of different Arab resistance communities, across national, political, cultural, and demographic boundaries, in responding to it. In analyzing the ongoing tug-of-war between Arab authoritarian rulers and their diasporic dissidents, the potentials, limitations, and future prospects of “cyberactivism” will be explored through the Arab diasporic dissidents’ voices and experiences.
Sahar Alshoubaki: American Palestinian Literature: Grounds for Joint Struggle and International Solidarity
The various political conflicts that shape the Middle East’s history, especially the continuous occupation of Palestine has produced a wide range of narratives that are inherently loaded with traumatic memories, displacements, injustices, and human rights violations. American Palestinian writers emerged to serve as active agents in creating narratives that focus not only on bearing witness to the Palestinian suffering, but also on soliciting international solidarity, especially Black Palestinian solidarity, and building a global movement of fighting for human rights and justice in Palestine. In this paper, I explore Susan Abulhawa’s and Ibtisam Barakat’s works to examine the ways they register the plight of the Palestinian people who live precarious lives as refugees and struggle not only against the Israeli occupation, but also against all kinds of oppression, be they political, cultural, economic, or oppressions of gender. Most importantly, I pay attention to the ways both authors renew questions of nationalist resistance and freedom by drawing connections to shared struggles with other oppressed communities. Because the fight and resistance against the occupation is anchored in universal human rights and international law, I also discuss how the writers frame their struggles within the context of universal human rights and calls for worldwide recognition of their rights. The authors recognize that after long years of failed peace negotiations and attempts to silence the Palestinian narrative, the practical way to resist the occupation is to build a common ground and global movement of solidarity.
Saliem Shehadeh (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Tomomi Kimukawa): Please see above under Rabab Abdulhadi
Seif Da'Na: Unmaking imperialist ventures in West Asia region: Rise of Sadatism, replacement of socialism with neo-liberalism, ideological invasion and mass indoctrination
The post-1967 unmaking of Nasser’s Arab-socialist Egypt represents one of the most successful imperialist ventures in West Asia region since WWII. Restructuring the Arab World’s most populous country, as well as its political and cultural center, in sync with imperialist regional and global interests was not only political, economic, and military, but also ideological as well. The outcome was the rise of Sadatism[1] as model that informed subsequent imperialist policies in the Arab World. Politically, Egypt moved away from the Soviet to the American camp, and ultimately broke with the Arab consensus and signed a separate “peace” treaty with its former arch-enemy, Israel. Economically, Sadat’s Egypt replaced the former Third World Socialist model with neo-liberalism, leading to dismantling a notably vibrant public sector, increase in poverty and inequality rates, and a noticeable decline in annual growth rate, average worker productivity, and job growth rates. Militarily, Egypt did not only shift to American-based ordnance, but it’s new military and combat doctrine redefined enemies and friends anew. All these changes corresponded with an aggressive ideological invasion and mass indoctrination that culminated in the decline of Arab socialist ideology, the Arab’s ideology of resistance. As such, Egypt represents a model, an ideal type, to explain much about the multi front wars on and in Syria, even prior to the 2011 events. This chapter argues that understanding the Egyptian model is crucial to the conceptualization of the total attack on Syria, especially since the 1967 Arab defeat, primarily responsible for begetting the Sadat’s model, remained short of unmaking Syria. Therefore, both Arab Socialism, Arabs anti-imperialist ideology of resistance, and Syria’s valuable geopolitical role were the target of a multi-front war.
Seyed Hossein Nassab: Images of the Cleric in Iranian Islamic Comedy-Dramas: Lizard (Marmulak) and Scandal (Rosvayi)
This is a study of images of the cleric in Iranian comedy-drama films, namely Lizard (Marmulak, 2004) and Scandal (Rosvayi, 2013). Both films employ comedic methods in conveying their messages while providing a taboo-breaking criticism of sharia-minded individuals in Iranian society. Both films have religious messages that make the films Islamic and acts of commanding the good and forbidding the wrong (amr-e beh mar’ruf va-nahy az monkar). The main character of both films commits theft and is attempting to escape, only to be protected by a Muslim cleric. The comedic features of the films are interestingly linked to the segregation in Iranian society. The segregated groups, from conservative religious to "liberal" individuals, interact in the films and occasionally cause humorous reactions and scandalous events. The comedic techniques and filming techniques highlight the separation between the characters, their tensions, and connections. Both films are social commentaries on social injustices portrayed in the two films, including patriarchy. Both films' narratives employ typological figurations as sophisticated methods to tell religious stories. For example, Lizard portrays a scene that reminds the viewer of the Quranic story of Adam in the Garden. And, Scandal tells a story similar to a famous legend of Mir Damad (d. 1631). Both Lizard and Scandal portray the image of the cleric as a protector who knows what others will realize at the end. However, the films show that the respect clerics receive in Iran is conditional.
Sumia Alkaisi: Emergent voice in Arabic and Arab-Anglophone literature: Hassan Blasim Stories: The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes and Berlin Truck
This paper focuses on Hassan Blasim as an emergent voice in Arabic and Arab anglophone literature. It argues that Blasim’s stories, namely The Nightmares of Carlos Fuentes and Berlin Truck, employ magic realism to unpleasantly shake the readers to the core. This study examines how Blasim’s stories suggest that the best way to understand an immigrant’s journey is not through sympathy and pity. For the reader’s experience to be authentic, he/she must somehow relive the horrific and tumultuous experiences of the refugee’s underworld reality. Magic realism allows Blasim to set his stories in familiar, universally known settings but adds graphic, shocking details to intensify the struggles of the refugee for the reader. This often unpleasantly shocking style allows his readers to delve into an authentic experience. By blurring the lines between real and surreal, reality and illusion, Blasim opens up a portal for his readers to relive the horrors of illegal immigration. His dismissal of empathy becomes an invitation into the anti-cathartic heart of darkness. Blasim subverts the appealing notion of pity that permeates Arab immigrant literature to introduce the unsettling, almost demonic side of the refugee’s struggle. This paper, therefore, argues that it is the Kafkaesque aspects of monstrosity and nightmares that define Blasim’s immigrant’s magic but macabre realism.
Tayseer Abu Odeh: The Politics of al-milhat al-filastiniyya in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s Gaza Weddings
This article examines thoroughly the complex interplay between the Arabic notion of Al-milhat al-filastiniyya (The Palestine Comedies), the politics of catastrophe, the aesthetics of translation, fantasy and dreams in Ibrahim Nasrallah’s A’ras amna Gaza Weddings (2004). Although Nasrallah’s intellectual project of al-milhat al-falastiniyya embodies an entire series of the Palestine Comedies told and dramatized across twelve heterogeneous volumes, Gaza Weddings draws heavily on the linguistic, thematic, political and discursive embodiment of Al-milhat al-filastiniyya as a cultural and aesthetic form of Arabic and Palestinian mode of resistance that flies in the face of the settler-colonial discourses of Zionism and Eurocentric narratives of tragedy and comedy. More concretely, Gaza Weddings reimagines and interrogates multiple colonial and secular/vernacular intersections between fantasy, tragedy, comedy and the politics of mourning within the Palestinian family structure, tradition and sociological imagination. Gaza Weddings also challenges the Eurocentric and postcolonial sociopolitical and aesthetic meaning and content of comedy and tragedy by incorporating the contradictory and discursive amalgam of the notion of al-milhat al-filastiniyya including, but not limited to, political resistance, love, cultural, fantasy hegemony, settler-colonial discourse of cultural and literary defeatism, trauma, colonialism and the politics of hope and literature. More emphasis will be placed upon Edward Said’s epistemological interpretation of culture and settler-colonialism along with Judith Butler’s argument on the politics of mourning, catastrophe, hope and performativity.
Tomomi Kimukawa (double session with Alohalani Brown, Cynthia Franklin, ‘Ihilani Lasconia, ‘Ilima Long, Maan Odeh, Malia Hulleman, Rabab Abdulhadi, Saliem Shehadeh): Please see above under Rabab Abdulhadi
Waleed Mahdi: Yemeni conceptions of the United States through the visual power of political cartoonists
Current scholarship on Yemen has extensively examined the country’s fragile nature of state power and how it is fractured through military division, sectarian unrest, tribal conflict, regional disunity, partisan polarization, and foreign intervention. Few scholars like Sheila Carapico and Isa Blumi and activists like Medea Benjamin and Jeremy Scahill provide insights into the US paradoxical promotion of democracy and deployment of military drones in Yemen. None in the existing literature on Yemen, however, recognizes Yemeni conceptions of the United States, especially through the visual power of political cartoons, in exhibiting local voices beyond the dominant narration of Yemenis as victims. This paper, therefore, reveals the various articulations of the United States in Yemeni contemporary political cartoons. Chief among the Yemeni cartoonists known for their illustrations of the United States are Kamal Sharaf, Rashad Al-Sami', Samer al-Shamiri, and Hilal al-Morqab. These cartoonists, I argue, advance critiques of US power in varied, often contradictory, ways that draw from Yemeni aesthetics and internal division in relation to meanings of war and peace. The context of my analysis is shaped by US-Yemeni cultural politics at the interplay of the tragic attacks of 9/11 in the United States (2001) and the revolutionary fervor of the Arab Spring (2011) in Yemen. The paper’s significance lies not only in theoretically interconnecting underexplored and underrepresented voices and aesthetics but also in contributing new understandings of Yemeni agency vis-à-vis the United States.
Yasemin Dildar: The Impact of Covid-19 Pandemic on Women in Turkey
This paper analyzes the impact of Covid-19 pandemic on women in Turkey focusing on three aspects of their welfare: labor market outcomes, increase in unpaid housework and domestic violence. The pandemic has deepened social and economic inequalities everywhere in the world including gender inequalities. There has been an escalation of violence against women, as stay-at home orders force women to shelter in place with their abusers. More people staying at home also meant that burden of unpaid care and housework increased for women. The impact of the pandemic on the labor markets is also highly gendered. Women are disproportionally more effected in Turkey due to three reasons: i) the majority of female employment is concentrated in the service sector; ii) informality is more widespread among women, iii) increased caregiving responsibilities due to school closures reduce their labor supply. Household labor force surveys are going to be used to analyze the impact of pandemic on women’s labor market outcomes. A unique dataset from a private research company (KONDA) provides up to date information on couples' time use. Their two monthly surveys (April 2018 and May 2020) will be analyzed to compare household division of labor before and after the pandemic. Finally, Google search data for a smartphone application (KADES) for women to seek emergency help in case of domestic violence is going to be used to analyze the impact of pandemic on violence against women.
Yasmeen Mekawy: Hope, Despair, and Nostalgia in Post-Revolutionary Media in Egypt
This paper analyzes the affective dynamics of post-revolutionary representations of the 2011 Egyptian uprising in music videos, television series, novels, social media, and film. I examine depictions that center on the utopian moments of collective joy of protest, as well as more somber portrayals that challenge a romanticized view of resistance by dwelling on the defeat, despair, and devastating repercussions of the uprising. I argue that while such media can evoke both hope and hopelessness, both kinds of representations counter the state’s erasure of the revolution in public space as well as its resignification of the uprising as a criminal conspiracy in pro-regime media. However, nostalgic depictions also contribute to the construction of the revolution as an object or scene of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,” in which the loss of the object is unbearable because the attachment is itself bound up with “the subject’s sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world.” The nostalgia evoked in pro-revolutionary media thus has an ambivalent political effect: on the one hand, it relegates to the revolution to the past, a moment in history that has passed and cannot be recovered. Nonetheless, despite the current repressive climate, the enduring attachment to and representation of the revolution as an authentic moment of national unity and self-determination preserves the collective memory of the revolution as a possible future basis for resistance. This paper draws on interpretive analysis of media texts as well as interviews conducted with participants of the revolution in its aftermath.
Yousef Baker: The racialized roots and consequences of America’s invasion of Iraq
The effects of America’s 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq are fast becoming distant memories in the American imaginary. In remembering the war, the analytical gaze is seldom on the perpetrators of violence but their targets. What would happen if we understood the war in Iraq as being fundamentally about the United States as opposed to Iraq? Re-remembering the American “nature” of the war makes visible the dialectical relationship between race-making and political economy. This paper argues that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was a racialized war. Anti-Muslim discourse justified the drive to invade Iraq utilizing conceptual frameworks built historically by anti-Black and anti-Indigenous racism. The subsequent occupation used and furthered the construction of a racialized Muslim subject. The political economy of the war functioned “domestically” to bolster the military industrial sector. Weapons and ammunitions were recycled as they were bought up by police departments throughout the US with the help of federal government funding. Along with military hardware, also came counter-insurgency strategies to deploy across American cities. The Iraq war and the “war on terror” more generally were processes that militarized American policing in the 21st century. It furthered anti-Black, anti-indigenous, and anti-immigrant racism through its deployment of anti-Muslim racism. This paper demonstrates these processes based on an examination of leading conservative thinkers, discursive analysis of speeches, memoirs, and auto-biographies of key figures involved in the Iraq war, as well as analysis of American policies and strategies utilized in Iraq.