Archive of Past Events
2023
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Thursday, December 14, 2023 What’s in a Leak?: The Struggle for Information Justice in the Modern Middle East
Chloe Bordewich, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Digital Humanities, Jackman Humanities Institute, University of TorontoHegeman 204A 5:30 pm – 6:30 pm EST/GMT-5 In the late 19th century, an explosion of communication technologies and mass media made it possible to transmit more information across greater distances than ever before. State authorities panicked as older forms of official secrecy frayed, and began developing new forms of information control. For citizens, urgent questions emerged: What did people have a right to know? What was the state entitled to conceal? In Cairo, Egypt, these questions burst into the public eye at the 1896 trial of a telegraph operator and a celebrity publisher who were accused of spreading a military leak. The watershed case exposed rising anti-colonial fervor, government officials’ inability to grasp technology, and profoundly different ideas of the public good. This episode demonstrates the urgency of studying information in its own right—its flow, its obstacles, its ephemeral forms. It also introduces a new lens for understanding the 20th-century Middle East that can help us explain the myths and silences that have haunted frustrated struggles for justice for over a century. |
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Tuesday, December 12, 2023 Beyond Borders: Gendered Histories of Colonial and Postcolonial Race-Making in the Middle East and North Africa
Dahlia El Zein, PhD Candidate, Department of History, University of PennsylvaniaHegeman 204A 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 As a system of social differentiation in the Middle East and North Africa during colonialism and postcolonialism, race defied fixed categorizations, while also moving across time and space. This fluidity was exemplified by the increasing presence of Lebanese Syrians in colonial French West Africa (1895-1958) during French mandate rule (1920-1946) in the Levant. Although the economic prowess of this Levantine community in West Africa has been studied—emphasizing their role as an entrepreneurial trader class leveraging the colonial economy for upward mobility—the Lebanese Syrian diaspora in West Africa has been notably absent from histories of race-making under French colonialism, despite the enduring legacies of such processes in the Levant, broader Middle East, and North Africa. In this talk, I discuss the main findings of my research, which traces the movement of Lebanese Syrians across the French empire in the early-to-mid 20th century. I show how racialization transformed as people moved from Beirut to Marseille to Dakar and back, influencing the shifting racial positionalities of this mobile group as well as those in the places through which they moved. Using diverse sources that include official documents, travelogues, memoirs, periodicals, family papers, cemeteries, and novels in Arabic, French, and English from Beirut, Dakar, and Paris, I argue that mobile processes of racialization were also gendered. Women faced the lion’s share of biopolitical regulation from French colonial authorities and Levantine and West African communities, while men became the visible face of this control as key bodies for the making of racialized subjects across the Empire and in the polities that would replace it. |
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Thursday, December 7, 2023 Damascus Fijeh Water Supply and Hygienic Modernity Imperialism
Benan Grams, PhD, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Loyola University, New Orleans Hegeman 204A 5:30 pm EST/GMT-5 Since the second half of the 19th century, there has been a global recognition of the crucial role of hygiene and clean water in combating diseases that historically plagued humanity. Sanitary water systems became integral to a worldwide movement aimed at enhancing public health and minimizing waterborne illnesses. The 1903 Fijeh Water Project in Damascus was an Ottoman measure initiated to elevate hygienic standards and improve public health within the Syrian province, particularly amidst recurrent cholera outbreaks. It constituted part of the Ottoman Empire's efforts to develop its public health sector. However, the funding challenges the project encountered and the diplomatic tensions it sparked underscore the political nature of public health. The case demonstrates how the Ottoman public health sector was subject to influences from hygienic modernity imperialism, intricately linked to global imperialist and capitalist endeavors of major powers. The Ottoman government's ability to sustain hygiene services in certain communities was contingent upon not conflicting with the capitalist interests of influential entities. The narrative of the Damascus Fijeh water project elucidates how the Ottomans' endeavors to modernize public health were undermined by the same powers that criticized their inadequate public health measures. |
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Wednesday, October 25, 2023 Regional Reverberations of the War on Gaza
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4As the war on Gaza intensifies and potentially expands, the Middle East Studies Program invites the Bard community to learn about its reverberations across the region, particularly in Lebanon, Egypt, and Turkey. The short presentations will be followed by ample time for audience questions. This event features: Ziad Dallal, Ibrahim Elhoudaiby, and Pinar Kemerli. Download: Regional-Poster.pdf |
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Tuesday, October 24, 2023 Nathan Thrall and Abed Salama, Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:15 pm – 6:45 pm EDT/GMT-4We are very happy to welcome Nathan Thrall to Bard for a conversation between him and Abed Salama, the protagonist of Thrall's book A Day in the Life of Abed Salama: Anatomy of a Jerusalem Tragedy (Metropolitan Books). This event is sponsored by the Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies Programs. You can read and listen to an excerpt from the book here. In his book, the struggle over Israel-Palestine is rendered at the human scale through the terrible story of a school bus accident that killed Abed’s five-year-old son Milad. Placing the personal narrative in the context of structural forces, A Day in the Life of Abed Salama elucidates the daily injustices faced by the roughly 3.2 million Palestinians living in the West Bank. Richly reported and deeply researched, the book cuts through the abstractions of 'the conflict' and 'the occupation' with a visceral and bracing account of an apparently exceptional event that reveals the painful realities of everyday life for Palestinians. We have been planning this event for months, but it now takes on special relevance given the unfolding events in the Gaza Strip. As a recent review in the Guardian put it, "it feels hard to recommend reading material against such a backdrop, but a book such as A Day in the Life of Abed Salama brims over with just the sort of compassion and understanding that is needed at a time like this. ... Thrall looks at the Israel/Palestine conflict with unflinching clarity and quiet anger, but above all, with nuance. At a time when facts have become weapons in this seemingly endless conflict, this is a book that speaks with deep and authentic truth of ordinary lives trapped in the jaws of history." Copies of the book will be available for purchase. Nathan Thrall is the author of The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine (Metropolitan, 2017), and has written extensively on the region in the New York Times Magazine, the Guardian, the London Review of Books, and the New York Review of Books. He spent a decade at the International Crisis Group, where he was director of the Arab-Israeli Project. He lives in Jerusalem. Abed Salama is a Palestinian living under Israeli rule in the enclave of Anata in greater Jerusalem. Salama’s story of losing his five-year-old son Milad in a harrowing school bus accident provides the framework for Thrall’s depiction of Israel/Palestine. |
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Tuesday, September 26, 2023 Politics of Literature and Translation In the Novels of Bachtyar Ali
Guest lecturers Kareem Abdulrahman and Bachtyar AliHegeman 201 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm EDT/GMT-4 Politics has at least two faces in the works of Iraqi Kurdish novelist Bachtyar Ali. While his characters are in a constant search to prove their humanity, politics often appears as a barrier in that search. In The Last Pomegranate Tree, for example, a meditation on fatherhood is intertwined with the discovery of increasing corruption in political leadership. Why does salvation seem to fall beyond politics? Given the recent history of Iraqi Kurdistan, what is the significance of politics in literature? Yet another face is the politics of literature: Kurdish language has lived on the margins of the more dominant languages in the Middle East for centuries. In this context, literary translation could be seen as an effort to put the Kurds, the largest minority group without their own nation state, on the cultural map of the world. Here the expression that the translator is a “traitor” may ring hollow when the translator appears first of all as an activist with loyalties. What then are the politics of translating Kurdish literature in the contemporary world? This event invites conversation and reflection with a novelist and his translator. |
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Wednesday, April 12, 2023 “A Body Without a Soul:” Juliana Seraphim and Palestinian Art in 1970s Beirut
Dr. Alessandra Amin, University of PennsylvaniaOlin 102 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 “The galleries of Beirut are becoming a body without a soul,” wrote Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata in 1970, “for the soul was set free in the streets and in the [refugee] camps.” The Lebanese capital was at once a beacon of cosmopolitanism and a tangle of sectarian divisions, its visual culture increasingly fractured along sociopolitical lines. To the right of the political spectrum were “the galleries” of the anti-Palestinian, Christian East, filled with bourgeois, apolitical paintings; to the left were “the streets” of the Muslim West––including the Palestinian camps––where images of freedom fighters papered walls and dominated exhibitions. Like all artworlds under pressure, though, Beirut’s visual landscape was more complex than it appeared at first glance. This talk focuses on the work of Juliana Seraphim (1934- 2005), a Palestinian-born bonne vivante whose status as a middle-class Christian granted her Lebanese citizenship and enabled her assimilation into Beirut’s commercial art scene. Illegible in both Palestinian nationalist and Lebanese sectarian terms, Seraphim channeled her experience of exile into fantastical, hybrid forms that embrace the feminine and the grotesque in equal measure. Troubling binary distinctions between “committed” Palestinian art and its “apolitical” Lebanese foil, this talk examines the triangulation of deliberate frivolity, nonreproductive sexuality, and exilic subjectivity that animates a rich corpus of Seraphim’s work from the late 1960s and 1970s. Alessandra Amin received her doctorate in art history from UCLA in 2022 and is currently the Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow in Palestine Studies at Columbia University. She is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, which considers the emergence of the dream and the maternal body as nested modes of relating to Palestine in art made during the heyday of the Palestinian Revolution (1965-1982). During the 2023–2024 academic year, she will be an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania. |
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Tuesday, March 14, 2023 Teach-In: The Earthquake in Turkey & Syria
Olin Humanities, Room 102 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm EDT/GMT-4Please join us on Tuesday, March 14, from 3:30–4:30 pm in Olin 102 for a teach-in to take stock of the earthquake(s) and their continued devastation in various parts of Turkey and Syria. Panelists include Lara Fresko Madra (Fellow at OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts), Pinar Kemerli (Assistant Professor of Political Studies), and Ziad Abu-Rish (Associate Professor of Human Rights and Middle Eastern Studies; CHRA MA Director). Topics include: —The nature and scope of the earthquake(s). —The differential devastation across various regions and communities. —The local, regional, and international dynamics of responding. —Political legacies and fallout surrounding this and past earthquakes. We will distribute a sample list of places to donate and/or keep up with the relevant news during the event and make it available to share via email for those that cannot attend. This teach-in is supported by the OSUN Center for Human Rights and the Arts, the Human Rights Project, and the Middle Eastern Studies Program. |