The East is a Podcast Sina Rahmani (@urorientalist)

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
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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

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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.