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.

Fair game?

Dean Hardman questions the relationship between public funding for sport and the reaction in the British press to the performance of UK players at Wimbledon who have 'failed' to live up to Andy Murray.

If you witnessed much of the British media reaction to the first round of Wimbledon last week, like me, you probably weren’t too surprised at some of the comments aimed at Britain’s tennis players, as they ‘crashed out’ of the tournament. They were invariably described as a national disgrace, as pathetic and, most tellingly, as a waste of public money and funding.

Alex Bogdanovic seemed to be the most harshly criticized, described by the Mirror as ‘serial loser Alex Bogdanovic’, with the opening to its news report of the first round pretty much summing up its stance, and that of the media as a whole:

‘King of the bottlers Alex Bogdanovic became Wimbledon's biggest all-time loser as the Brits equaled their worst wipe-out in history.
On a day of crying shame which left the Union Jack at half-mast, Anne Keothavong broke down in tears after her shock defeat by Patricia Mayr as the strawberry fields of SW19 became a showcase for Britain's Rot Talent.’ (Mirror)

I think that it’s pretty safe to assume that the British media, especially the tabloid press, have always been committed to a nationalist ideology, and that the fortunes of British players have always been a subject of fierce debate. However, I wonder whether the collective sense of shame that we are encouraged to feel, and the sense of outrage that is palpable, is partly to do with the level of public funding that tennis (and most other sports) receives.

There seems to be a growing sense that sportsmen and women should be accountable to the public and, when they fail to live up to the expectations that are partly created by an increase in funding, they should expect similar treatment to MPs who have built duck ponds and had moats cleaned – strong criticism for having wasted ‘our’ money.

Sports like tennis and athletics used to be individual endeavors in which athletes competed primarily for themselves. If ‘we’, as the media and public, wanted to share in any success or commiserate in failure, then great, but I don’t feel that there was the same sense of outright hostility towards athletes who performed to below expectations. The questions are whether this hostility and level accountability is fair and whether it is indeed related to the level of public funding directed towards sport.
(Photo credit: E01. Permissions.)