The CLCS Global Arab and Arab American forum is interested in works of the Arab diaspora, including the cultural production of Arab American and global Arab writers. The category “Global Arab” allows for a broad conceptualization of diasporic and multilingual work situated within the various national, ethnic, religious, and cultural contexts of the Arab world and the Middle East. The designation “Arab American” is linked to the category “Global Arab” yet deserves special attention as a distinct subfield within American literature that engages with the discourses of race and ethnicity in the United States as well as with the history of Arab and Middle Eastern migrations to the Americas.
ACLA CfP: Palestine/Israel: The Vocabulary of the Conflict and its Circulation
-
We invite submissions of proposals to participate in our ACLA seminar titled “Palestine/Israel: The Vocabulary of the Conflict and its Circulation.” A detailed description of the seminar here and at the end of this email. Feel free to contact us for more information. The deadline for submission through the ACLA website is Sept. 20.
Many thanks and best regards,
Ella Elbaz, PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative Literature, Stanford University
Na’ama Rokem, Associate Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
University of ChicagoPalestine/Israel: The Vocabulary of the Conflict and its Circulation
The purpose of this seminar is to create a conversation between Palestinian and Israeli cultures, which raises the question of the possibilities and impossibilities of the operation of comparison as a methodology. To what extent can we generate and discuss a shared set of metaphors and images that circulate within each culture and between the two and what might we learn through such an endeavor. We invite scholars of cultural production generated in the orbit of the conflict writ large, to reflect on common themes (such as exile, return, diaspora, memory, at-home-ness) as they intersect but also as they rise in separate, disparate, and even disconnected circumstances. By bringing together comparative and non-comparative research done in theater, visual arts, literature, history, music, and cinema we hope to crystalize the specific conditions in which images, terminologies and styles transfer from one culture to another. The questions we ask concern both the common grounds and the particularities of post-48 Israeli and Palestinian cultures: What are the spaces that allow interaction versus those that are disconnected (for example, the city of Haifa versus the Palestinian diaspora in the Arab world)? What is unique to each of these spaces in how it constructs cultural communication? Which ideas, forms, and imagery transgress geographical limitations and reach the other side of the conflict regardless to location? What are the key terms and metaphors that are common to both cultures in narrating their history and experience and in what ways are these terms represented differently (for example, exile)? How can we analyze and account for the commonalities found in places that do not invite knowing, understanding and accessing the cultural objects of the ‘enemy’? How can the rhetoric and the methodology of comparison account for the unequal power relations folded into – and sometimes obscured by – the term ‘conflict’?
We are interested on the one hand in circulation and translation between Hebrew and Arabic, and on the other hand in the cultural spheres in which the two develop a similar vocabulary despite the lack of exchange.
This topic was also posted in: CLCS 20th- and 21st-Century, LLC Arabic.
- Only members can participate in this group's discussions.