Palestine, Culture and Politics: Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish, the great Palestinian poet (best known in parts of western academia through having been championed by his friend Edward Said) died in August 2008 writes Patrick Williams.

The University of York organised a conference in his memory earlier this year, with a keynote by Barbara Harlow from the University of Texas, (another long-time friend of Said) and contributions from academics from Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, as well as the UK. I gave the final paper, on Darwish and ‘Late Style’, the Adorno-derived concept which Said had been thinking about in his final years and which is the subject of his posthumous book of the same name. The papers were interspersed with bi-lingual readings of Darwish’s poems by students and academics – and there was a very impressive (unscripted) performance of a long poem entirely from memory by one of the Egyptian contributors. Papers from the conference will form a special issue of the Routledge postcolonial journal Interventions.
(Photo credit: Yemisi Blake. Permissions.)

Palestine: Culture and Politics

As the first in what is intended as as an ongoing series of events, Patrick Williams and Anna Ball are organising a one-day symposium on Culture & Politics in Palestine, to be held at NTU on October 2nd. Details of the call for papers are below:

Palestine: Culture, Conflict and Representation
An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Friday 2nd October 2009

Nottingham Trent University

Keynote address by Professor Nur Masalha, Director of the Centre for Religion, History and Holy Land Studies, St Mary’s, Surrey

As a site of complex and enduring conflict, Palestine – conceived as a cultural entity – poses many challenges to those who wish to engage in the task of its meaningful representation. Nevertheless, a desire to confront these challenges continues to flourish – among political thinkers, activists, scholars, creative practitioners, writers and critics both within and beyond the Palestinian territories.

This interdisciplinary, one-day symposium invites scholars working from a range of academic and cultural perspectives to explore the complex relationships between culture, conflict and representation in the context of Palestine, as posed to them in their own research. The symposium poses two key questions: how might the various conflicts faced by Palestinian society and culture be adequately represented? Conversely, what are the conflicts entailed in the act of representation, whether of a political, cultural, artistic or scholarly nature?

Topics might include, but are not limited to:

• Conflicts relating to space, territory, nation and their representation
• Questions of media representation and coverage
• Conflicts of cultural identity and belonging – including statelessness, citizenship, exile and diaspora
• Conflicting subject-positions of a national, ethnic, gendered, class-based or generational nature
• The roles of culture and cultural initiatives within conflict: literature, film, art, media, or initiatives such as the literary festival Palfest or the women’s filmmaking NGO Shashat
• The politics of culture, representation and resistance
• The politics of culture, representation and conflict resolution
• The politics of transnational scholarly representation
• The potentials and pitfalls of (post)colonial studies or other forms of theorization as modes of representation
• Said’s legacy in the representation of the Palestinian struggle
• The ethics of representing conflict itself
  

The symposium will include a series of roundtable panels, a keynote address and film screening.

Abstracts are invited for 20-minute papers from across the disciplines. Abstracts should be no more than 500 words in length. The deadline for submission of abstracts is 7th August 2009, and should be sent to: anna.ball@ntu.ac.uk.

Those whose papers are accepted will be notified no later than 14th August.