Middle Eastern Studies at Bard College

THE IMPACT OF THE ‘ARAB SPRING’ ON FATAH-HAMAS RELATIONS AND ON ISRAELI-PALESTINIAN RELATIONS

Khalil Shikaki

Tuesday, Dec. 6, 2011
4:40 pm
Olin 203

Khalil Shikaki is the Director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research in Ramallah, on the West Bank. His surveys of Palestinian opinion over the past 20 years have made leaders across the political spectrum uncomfortable at one time or another, but they are widely regarded as the authoritative standard.  Likewise, his organization is now doing important work on the state of opinion and on government openness throughout the Arab world. Shikaki completed a doctorate in political science at Columbia in 1985; besides the reports on some one hundred public opinion surveys, he is the author of numerous papers on the conflict in publications such as Foreign Affairs and The Journal of Palestine Studies. Among numerous other special reports, he was one of the two principal co-authors of Strengthening Palestinian Public Institutions (Council of Foreign Relations 1999) and of Palestinian and Israeli Public Opinion: the Public Imperative in the Second Intifada (Indiana Un. Press, 2010).

Sponsored by: Middle Eastern Studies, Jewish Studies and the Levy Economics Institute

For more information please contact Kathleen Mullaly at ext. 7710 or mullaly@levy.org.

Cairo through Cinema: “The Yacoubian Building”

Wednesday, November 30th

6:30 P.M. Olin LC 115

“The Yacoubian Building”
directed by Marwan Hamed, Egypt, 2006
161 min.

“Cairo: a 70-year-old building of once-luxury flats with tenements on the roof. Zika, an aging libertine, feuds with his sister. Pius Haj Azzam takes a second wife, in secret, to satisfy sexual drive within religious bounds. Bothayna, poor and beautiful, supports her family, wanting to do so with dignity intact. Her former fiancé, Taha, the janitor’s son, humiliated by the police, turns to fundamentalism. Hatem, a gay editor, seduces and corrupts a young man from the sticks. Two brothers, Copts, one a tailor and one Zika’s factotum, connive for property. Allah is on most everyone’s lips, and corruption is in their hearts. European values, both refined and worldly, provide a subtext.”

Middle Eastern Studies

**Open House**

Wednesday November 16 4-6pm

Come and meet MES faculty and students. Find out about Spring courses and study abroad programs.

Refreshments will be served.

Middle Eastern Studies Speaker Series

“Syria and the Arab Uprisings”

Bassam Haddad, Assistant Professor, Department of Public and International Affairs, Director of the Middle East Studies Program, George Mason University

Wednesday, November 9 · 6:30pm – 8:30pm
Olin LC 115

After eight months of protests and violent regime response, the fate of the uprising in Syria continues to be intractable. With a highly cohesive regime at the top and a heterogeneous society that has failed to mount sustained and widespread collective action, we are faced with a stalemate that defies ready-made scenarios. In this talk Bassam Haddad will address some of the structural causes and dynamics of the Syrian uprisings, in order to shed light on possible outcomes.

Co-sponsored by the Human Rights Program, Center for Civic Engagement and Political Studies Program.

Film Series: Cairo Through Cinema

“Terrorism and Kebab”

Wednesday, November 2 · 6:30pm – 8:30pm

Olin LC 115

Directed by Sherif Arafa
Egypt, 1992, 105mins
Arabic with English subtitles

“Terrorism and Kebab” is a farce denouncing the absurdity of bureaucracy in modern Egypt. Adel Imam, Egypt’s leading comic actor, is a father who wants to move his son to a school closer to home. He goes to El-Mugamaa, the center of Cairo’s monolithic bureaucracy, to pick up the required documents. Frustrated by the lack of response, he ends up attacking a fundamentalist official and, when armed police respond to the situation, a machine gun accidentally finds its way into Imam’s hands.

As a terrorist, his demands to the Minister of Internal Affairs are simple: Shish Kebab made of high-class lamb. After having a hearty meal with his hostages, however, his demands become more political.

Film Series: Cairo Through Cinema

“Adrift on the Nile”
Directed by Hussein Kamal
Egypt, 1971, 115mins
Arabic with English subtitles

In “Adrift on the Nile” we meet a group of hedonistic middle-aged friends who gather each night on a luxurious houseboat for dancing, love-making and smoking hashish. When a young news reporter visits the houseboat to write a story on the group, she is outraged to learn the tragic depths of their social alienation.

Based on the novel by the Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz, this 1971 production offers a revealing look at the Egyptian elite on the eve of the 1967 War. By this time, Nasser had ushered in an age of enormous social change, leaving the sons and daughters of the old bourgeoisie high and dry.

Directed by Hussein Kamal, “Adrift on the Nile” features the atmospheric cinematography of Mostapha Emam and a delightful musical number in color.

Film Series: Cairo Through Cinema

A Man in Our House

Wednesday October 5th at 6:30 p.m.

Olin LC 115

Directed by Henri Barakat
Egypt, 1961, 159mins
Arabic with English subtitles

Based on the famous novel by Ihsan Abdel Qoddous, this 1961 classic is set prior to the 1952 revolution and stars the legendary Omar Sharif in one of his most memorable roles. Sharif plays Ibrahim, a member of the underground resistance who seeks refuge from the so-called “political police” by taking shelter in the home of a civil servant and his family.

Directed by Henri Barakat, this film offers a vivid depiction of the Egyptian resistance to the British occupation and features some of Egypt’s finest filmmaking talents.

The Freedom Theatre’s presentation will include a short video of several of The Freedom Theatre’s previous productions, including Animal Farm and Alice in Wonderland. The actors will then present sections of their latest production, devised from monologues they have written about their lives in the West Bank. Finally, there will be a talk-back with the company.

Sponsored by the Human Rights Project

The Freedom Theatre – a theatre and cultural centre in Jenin Refugee Camp – is developing the only professional venue for theatre and multimedia in the north of the West Bank in Occupied Palestine. Since it opened its doors in 2006, the organisation continues to grow, develop and expand, enabling the young generation in the area to develop new and important skills which will allow them to build a better future for themselves and for their society.

For more information on The Freedom Theatre, you can visit their website at: www.thefreedomtheatre.org

Middle Eastern Studies Speaker Series

presents

Fishing for the Past: Mediated Memories in a Palestinian Refugee Gathering, South Lebanon

Tuesday, September 20 · 7:00pm – 9:00pm Olin 102

“Terrace of the Sea” was shot in 2008 in Jal el Bahar, an unofficial Palestinian Bedouin gathering established in 1948 on the outskirts of Tyre. Structured around a collection of family photographs taken over three generations, the film engages the historical experience of the Ibrahim family not simply or primarily through the prism of na…tionalist politics, but also through their relationship to work and to the physical environment in which they are living. With the political dimension decentered one becomes aware of overlapping attachments – in particular the tension between a love of home and the land on which it is built and the ties that continue to bind refugees to their country of origin. Rather than being a straightforward expository narrative, or an act of witness or political solidarity, the film reflects on the processes of memory, foregrounding the more provisional and subjective forms of recollection that have tended to be silenced or left unassimilated by a renascent nationalist history.

“Still Life” is the first sequence in a triptych of portraits that explores the mediations of memory among Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon. It considers how a series of photos brought to Lebanon by Said Otruk, an elderly Palestinian fisherman from Acre, mediate both his present experience and recollections of his life in Palestine before 1948. We see how the “reality” represented in these images has become conflated with them; Said repeatedly misremembers the number of his fishing boat and his age when he left, and when he describes photos of Acre’s waterfront as capturing the “golden age”, he seems to be gesturing as much at the splendid figure of his own youth as at the halcyon days of pre-48 Palestine. Rather than being an expository narrative, Still Life examines the dislocations of memory, the effects of aging and forgetfulness, and the recollection of youthful vitality.

Diana Allan is an anthropologist and filmmaker. She is the founder and co-director of the Nakba Archive, a testimonial project that has recorded interviews on film with first generation Palestinian refugees living in Lebanon, and the founder of Lens on Lebanon, a grassroots media initiative established during the 2006 Lebanon/Israel war. She is a junior fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and a research affiliate at the American University of Beirut.

This event is co-sponsored by the Human Rights Program