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Scarspeak:Thinking the Mother Tongue as a Formative Mark
Get PDFThis chapter proposes the scar as a productive image to conceptualize the relation of speakers to the particular language otherwise called mother tongue, native or first language. Thinking of this relation in terms of a scar avoids the biopolitical implications of concepts derived from the context of family and birth that have, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, come to present language as basis of a nation state. The image of the scar also avoids the biographical normalization and linguistic hierarchization implied in the term first language, as both are equally important biopolitical strategies of forming individuals and communities. Thinking of the mother tongue in terms of a scar emphasizes the intensity of lasting formation and identification entailed by acquiring this particular language, and it highlights the violence inherent to these processes that tends to be covered up by the naturalizing and family-related imagery of native or mother tongue as well as by the favour implied in the term first language
War-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments:Reflections from the Middle East
Get PDFWar-torn Ecologies, An-Archic Fragments: Reflections from the Middle East identifies a conceptual intersection between war, affect, and ecology from the Middle East. It creates a counter archive of texts by ethnographers and artists, and enables divergent worlds to share a conversation through the crevices of mass violence across species. Delving into vital encounters with mulberry trees, wild medicinal plants, jinns, and goats, as well as bleaker experiences with toxic war materials like landmines, this volume expands an ecological sensorium that works through displacement, memory, endurance, and praxis.Foreword by Françoise VergèsWar-torn Ecologies: Human and More-than-Human Intersections of Ethnography and the Arts | UMUT YILDIRIM | 1-25Mulberry Affects: Ecology, Memory, and Aesthetics on the Shores of the Tigris River in the Wake of Genocide | UMUT YILDIRIM | 27-66Who’s Afraid of Ideology? | MARWA ARSANIOS | 67-83Note the Ghosts: Among the More-than-Living in Iraq | KALI RUBAII | 85-103Great Sand: Grains of Occupation and Representation | NADINE HATTOM | 105-120Hide Your Water from the Sun: A Performance for Spirited Waters | JUMANA EMIL ABBOUD | 121-138Of Goats and Bombs: How to Live (and Die) in an Explosive Landscape | MUNIRA KHAYYAT | 139-166ReferencesNotes on the ContributorsInde
Hide Your Water from the Sun:A Performance for Spirited Waters
Get PDFThis essay is an excerpt from Jumana Emil Abboud’s ongoing journal, which she started keeping in 2010. With the help of photographer Issa Freij, the artist identified spirited water spots in the topography of Palestine, based on her childhood memories and a 1922 study on Haunted Springs and Water Demons in Palestine. The text was written as part of a performance by Abboud at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Center in 2016
Coding Utopias
Get PDFThere is no shortage of critiques of utopian imaginaries for being coded in colonial, Western, masculine, Christian, and extractive ideologies. Utopia has been, and continues to be, an often violent gesture that chooses the future of select groups and certain forms of life at the expense of others. Is utopia, then, still worth keeping in a world that has been so damaged through its violent deployments? Is it possible not to treat utopia merely as a model of abstract futurity based on escapist projections of a harmonious ideal? What happens when utopia is conceived not only as a way of imagining a better future but also as a way of intervening in the present by addressing the past? Can utopia welcome ambivalence, disquietude, paradox, opacity, and uncertainty? This symposium draws on the notion of coding, which is deployed in multiple areas ranging from genetic coding and cybernetics to politics and art, and understands it as a mode of languaging that aims at engineering futures. This notion helps to reveal the difficulty of engaging with the transmissions and effects of utopian projects and the encoded logics they impose on social and environmental possibilities. It also allows for thinking about the possibility of de-coding the codes of extractive utopias by attuning to the anti- and decolonial cracks in colonial histories, practices, and discourses where new and unforeseen models of utopia might emerge. To this end, the event seeks to gather scholars, theorists, and practitioners working on the possibility of alternative models of the future and the present that account for and attempt to repair historical and contemporary colonial ecologies. The symposium aims to develop critical approaches to the concept and project of utopia from literary studies, post- and decolonial studies, science and technology studies, comparative literature, environmental humanities, psychoanalysis, history, anthropology, sexuality and gender studies, and beyond. The ensuing discussion will emphasize the implicit biases and disparities of power built into, and often obscured by, utopian and dystopian world-making
