A TALK BY ABDUL-RAHIM AL-SHAIKH

Associate Professor of Philosophy and Cultural and Arab Studies, Birzeit Universityand

Fulbright Scholar, 2015-1016, at the Center for Palestine Studies, Columbia University

 

DISCUSSANT: SAMERA ESMEIR

Associate Professor, Department of Rhetoric, University of California, Berkeley

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.

· 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 Professor 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