Columbus Goes East: Renaming Palestine
04.12.2016 | 5:00 – 7:00 PM | Maude Fife Room, 315 Wheeler Hall
with Abdul-Rahim Al-Shaikh, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural and Arab Studies, Birzeit University and Fulbright Scholar, 2015-1016, at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University
Discussant: Samera Esmeir, Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley
Event introduced by Professor Paola Bacchetta, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, UC, Berkeley; Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights
Speaker and Discussant Introduced by Angana Chatterji, Co-chair, Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race and Gender, UC, Berkeley, and Visiting Scholar, Institute for the Study of Human Rights, Columbia University
Based on an extensive photo archive of road signs, this talk interrogates the colonial politics of toponymy within historic Palestine from as early as 1856. The talk constructs a genealogy of names commissions and their inherent, zionist politics. It elaborates on the modes of resistance against these colonial politics and examines the political, cultural, and artistic effects of map transformations on Palestinian imaginations.
Hosted by Project on Political Conflict, Gender and People’s Rights, Center for Race and Gender. Co-sponsored by Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Department of English, Department of Gender and Women’s Studies, Department of Geography, Townsend Center for the Humanities Working Group and CRG Working Group on Muslim Identities and Cultures, Islamophobia Research and Documentation Project.