Guest host and writer Amal Nura (@amaalnuura) interviews Aziz Faarah (@azizfaarah), independent archivist and collector of Somali artifacts. They discuss his auction adventures and encounters with vendors including one who spent a few weeks in Somali jails in the 1970s https://twitter.com/azizfaarah/status/1736547727821943090. Their conversation touches on the value of material culture, the museum as a colonial invention and Aziz’s mission to reclaim and repatriate pieces to Somalis in the Horn of Africa and across the diaspora.

To read more and get a glimpse into Aziz’s collection:  https://africasacountry.com/2024/04/buying-back-our-things

 

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Rana Barakat is associate professor of history at Birzeit University in Palestine and director of the BZU Museum (@bzu.museum).

Abduljawad Omar (@HHamayel2) is a lecturer at Birzeit University.  

Check out the article, "The parallel human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian political prisoners" by Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh

An archive of Walid Daqqa's writings https://shorturl.at/hyzQX

Watch the video edition on our YouTube channel

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On Day 191 the tankie therapy group convenes (Joe Emersberger (@rosendo_joe), Rob Rousseau (@robrousseau), Mikey Inouye (@karaokecomputer), Sina Rahmani (@UrOrientalist), Alex Aviña (@Alexander_Avina) but for an analytical discussion about Iran's missiles hitting Israeli airbases the day before. A summary of what happened, a media roundup, Jordan's role, the new equation, and more.

Watch this episode on Justin's YouTube channel

Consider supporting the show www.patreon.com/east_podcast

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Investigative journalist William Van Wagenen (@WVanwagenen) from The Cradle returns to the podcast to discuss his deep dive into what really happened on Oct 7th.

Watch this episode on our YouTube channel https://youtu.be/PP7ZBzTJFmU

Check out the article, "What Really Happened on October 7?" https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/what-really-happened-on-october-7/?feed_id=11264&_unique_id=65d3514b9b6fe Consider supporting the show www.patreon.com/east_podcast Check out the Anti-Imperialist Archive https://feeds.libsyn.com/437079/rss

 

Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso (@nasawiyya)

PANEL 3 “Seeing Palestine, Not Seeing the Palestinians: Gaza in the British Pathé Colonial Lens” Shahd Abusalama, Lebanese American University

My presentation will critically engage with the representation of the Palestine question in general and Gaza refugees in particular by British Pathé, which, as a leading media institution of the British Empire, was also a dedicated advocate of Zionist ambitions and Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine. While presenting corresponding reels, I will interrogate Pathé’s discursive strategies in representing the 1947-48 Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe), the 1956-7 Israeli occupation of Gaza, and Israel’s subsequent occupation of Gaza beginning in 1967, exposing its ideological framing of the Palestinian people as either “terrorists” or “helpless victims” and the glorification of the newborn state of Israel. I argue that British Pathé provided a consolidating hegemonic discourse on Palestine-Israel that prevails to this day in mainstream Western political, media, and academic discourse to shield Israel and its allies from responsibility. (25 minutes) PLENARY PANEL

Art credit: 

"Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza.

PANEL 2  

Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso (@nasawiyya)

 

"Queer Threads: Activist Fashion in Palestine" Roberto Filippello, University of Amsterdam

In this presentation I sketch the contours of the formation of an activist fashion scene across Palestine in the face of material challenges that the infrastructures of the occupation pose to the production and circulation of clothes. I theorize the creative practices of Palestinian fashion designers and image-makers as makeshift acts of collective disidentification with the ecocidal, racist, and queerphobic Zionist enterprise, and argue that “queer decolonial fashion practices” offer a model of creative activism wherein environmental ethics, anti-racism, and queer claims are fundamentally interconnected. Conjoining Gramscian analytical categories and queer epistemologies from the South, I highlight how sartorial praxis and embodiment figure in the imagination of Palestinian youth. (25 minutes)

“Laboratories of Speculation: Rethinking Jericho, ‘the City of the Moon’” Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois Chicago (via Zoom) Critical queer feminist study has lovingly brought renewed methodological attention to long-forgotten, once-inhabited sites, archives, geographies, and histories, which can be newly reanimated for the service of contemporary collective social life. One such instance in present-day Palestine has been the international art, writing, and research residency called el-Atlal (“The Ruins”) co-founded by Karim Kattan, Victoria Dabdoub, Rebecca Topakian, Céleste Haller from 2014-2019 in the town of Jericho, the “oldest city in the world.” Given its historical heritage and complex station in the local imagination, Jericho is a generative utopian site for enacting new incubatory spaces for alternative political and aesthetic possibility in the dystopian here and now. If Palestine, and the Palestinian people subject to Israeli rule, have long served as one of the foremost paradigmatic “laboratories” for the development of late modern settler security states and their fabrication of new technologies of policing, maiming, and killing perfected on Palestinians under siege, this talk explores how we might reimagine an archetypal “Palestine” instead as an experimental site of decolonial fantasy and creative freedom, one that also portends the ends of the conjoined US/Israeli settler security states and their forever wars on terror. (25 minutes)

 

Art credit: 

"Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza.

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine An In-Person and Livestreamed ConferenceWednesday, February 28, 2024   Panel 1

Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso (@nasawiyya)

 

“The Urgency of Anti-Imperial Feminism: Lessons from Palestine” Walaa Alqaisiya, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (via Zoom) (08:30-38:30) This talk maps the epistemic, political, and moral grounds informing the urgency of anti-imperial feminism that Palestine brings into sight. Combining decolonial and Third-Worldist Marxist theoretical approaches, the first part of the talk unpacks the functionality of gender to the onto-epistemic foundations of Zionist settler colonialism under US-led imperialism. The second part discusses how the centering of the Palestinian national question redefines the moral and political parameters of feminist and queer mobilisation. In doing so, the last part shows the limitations and tensions that post-structural feminist and queer approaches carry, when dealing with the question of liberation, violence, and development in global South contexts, such as Palestine. (25 minutes)  

“Christian Zionism, Displacement, and the Role of Travel” Jennifer Kelly, University of California, Santa Cruz (via Zoom)(~39:00-1:03:00) A central tenet of Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979, was unequivocal support for Israel and, by 1983, he began his first of many “Friendship Tours to Israel,” which included meetings with government officials and tours of Israeli military installations. Today, Christian Zionism tours follow this template, pairing pilgrimage with celebrations of Israel’s sustained displacement of Palestinians. At the center of displacement in Jerusalem, for example, is a biblical theme park—run by settlers—planned for Silwan that comprises a cable car, a seven-story Jewish cultural center on Wadi Hilweh land, and shopping centers and homes for settlers. And, during this current genocidal war on Gaza, Christian Zionists across the U.S. are once again eagerly seeing Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a sign of end times and calling for unchecked Israeli control over all of Palestine. In this paper, I show not only how tourism is never a thing apart from colonial state violence, but also how tourism is part of the fabric of a U.S. Christian Zionism that both enables and facilitates Palestinian displacement. (25 minutes)

 

Art credit: 

"Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza.

*This is a preview of the latest bonus episode. Sign up for $5 a month to access the entire conversation and help keep the show going or watch the full episode on our YouTube channel*

 

Trying out a new live format and was joined by friends of the show Alex Aviña (@Alexander_Avina) and Louis Allday (@Louis_Allday) for an angry deep dive into some of the terrible articles written on the Gaza genocide.

Watch the video edition on The East is a Podcast YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQH3uMQU3mk&ab_channel=TheEastisaPodcast

Some of the "articles" we discussed

https://damagemag.com/2024/03/05/seven-realities-of-israel-palestine/ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v45/n21/adam-shatz/vengeful-pathologies

Paris Yeros (@parisyeros) teaches at the Federal University of ABC in Brazil.  Guest host and friend of the show Bikrum Gil (@bikrumsinghgill) discuss Paris' latest article published in Agrarian South, "A Polycentric World Will Only Be Possible by the Intervention of the ‘Sixth Great Power"

Read the article here

https://www.agrariansouth.org/2023/12/16/a-polycentric-world-will-only-be-possible-by-the-intervention-of-the-sixth-great-power/

 

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Tankie therapy session as we watch the newest atrocities unfolding at al-Shifa, make historical parallels with the Argentine Dirty War and the 1857 War in India, the Battle of Algiers and the film Downfall... with Nora (@norabf), Matteo (@capassomat) , Mikey (@karaokecomputer), Sina (@UrOrientalist), and Alex (@Alexander_Avina).

 

Watch the video edition on The Anti-Empire Project YouTube channel

 

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Vijay Prasad (@vijayprashad) in conversation with friend of the podcast Frances Hasso (@nasawiyya).  

 

Sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Institute for Arts and Humanities, Departments of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and of Communication, and the Curriculums in Global Studies and in Peace, War, & Defense.

 

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