The East is a Podcast

A critical lens on the history of the present on West Asia and North Africa. Interviews with experts and archival mashups. Created by Sina Rahmani (twitter: @urorientalist)

The Martyrdom of Walid Daqqa w/ Rana Barakat and Abdaljawad Omar 04/17/2024

Tankie Group Therapy #13: We consider the matter closed 04/15/2024

The Mass Hannibal Event of October 7th w/ William Van Wagenen 04/11/2024

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine, Panel 3 04/08/2024

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine, Panel 2 04/08/2024

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine, Panel 2 PANEL 2 Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso "Queer Threads: Activist Fashion in Palestine" Roberto Filippello, University of Amsterdam In this presentation I sketch the contours of the formation of an activist fashion scene across Palestine in the face of material challenges that the infrastructures of the occupation pose to the production and circulation of clothes. I theorize the creative practices of Palestinian fashion designers and image-makers as makeshift acts of collective disidentification with the ecocidal, racist, and queerphobic Zionist enterprise, and argue that “queer decolonial fashion practices” offer a model of creative activism wherein environmental ethics, anti-racism, and queer claims are fundamentally interconnected. Conjoining Gramscian analytical categories and queer epistemologies from the South, I highlight how sartorial praxis and embodiment figure in the imagination of Palestinian youth. (25 minutes) “Laboratories of Speculation: Rethinking Jericho, ‘the City of the Moon’” Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois Chicago (via Zoom) Critical queer feminist study has lovingly brought renewed methodological attention to long-forgotten, once-inhabited sites, archives, geographies, and histories, which can be newly reanimated for the service of contemporary collective social life. One such instance in present-day Palestine has been the international art, writing, and research residency called el-Atlal (“The Ruins”) co-founded by Karim Kattan, Victoria Dabdoub, Rebecca Topakian, Céleste Haller from 2014-2019 in the town of Jericho, the “oldest city in the world.” Given its historical heritage and complex station in the local imagination, Jericho is a generative utopian site for enacting new incubatory spaces for alternative political and aesthetic possibility in the dystopian here and now. If Palestine, and the Palestinian people subject to Israeli rule, have long served as one of the foremost paradigmatic “laboratories” for the development of late modern settler security states and their fabrication of new technologies of policing, maiming, and killing perfected on Palestinians under siege, this talk explores how we might reimagine an archetypal “Palestine” instead as an experimental site of decolonial fantasy and creative freedom, one that also portends the ends of the conjoined US/Israeli settler security states and their forever wars on terror. (25 minutes) Art credit: "Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza. /episode/index/show/eastisapodcast/id/30738238

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine, Panel 1 04/08/2024

Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine, Panel 1 Concrete Imaginings: Building a Liberated Palestine An In-Person and Livestreamed ConferenceWednesday, February 28, 2024 Panel 1 Introductory Remarks by Professor Frances Hasso “The Urgency of Anti-Imperial Feminism: Lessons from Palestine” Walaa Alqaisiya, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (via Zoom) (08:30-38:30) This talk maps the epistemic, political, and moral grounds informing the urgency of anti-imperial feminism that Palestine brings into sight. Combining decolonial and Third-Worldist Marxist theoretical approaches, the first part of the talk unpacks the functionality of gender to the onto-epistemic foundations of Zionist settler colonialism under US-led imperialism. The second part discusses how the centering of the Palestinian national question redefines the moral and political parameters of feminist and queer mobilisation. In doing so, the last part shows the limitations and tensions that post-structural feminist and queer approaches carry, when dealing with the question of liberation, violence, and development in global South contexts, such as Palestine. (25 minutes) “Christian Zionism, Displacement, and the Role of Travel” Jennifer Kelly, University of California, Santa Cruz (via Zoom)(~39:00-1:03:00) A central tenet of Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979, was unequivocal support for Israel and, by 1983, he began his first of many “Friendship Tours to Israel,” which included meetings with government officials and tours of Israeli military installations. Today, Christian Zionism tours follow this template, pairing pilgrimage with celebrations of Israel’s sustained displacement of Palestinians. At the center of displacement in Jerusalem, for example, is a biblical theme park—run by settlers—planned for Silwan that comprises a cable car, a seven-story Jewish cultural center on Wadi Hilweh land, and shopping centers and homes for settlers. And, during this current genocidal war on Gaza, Christian Zionists across the U.S. are once again eagerly seeing Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a sign of end times and calling for unchecked Israeli control over all of Palestine. In this paper, I show not only how tourism is never a thing apart from colonial state violence, but also how tourism is part of the fabric of a U.S. Christian Zionism that both enables and facilitates Palestinian displacement. (25 minutes) Art credit: "Untitled 2022" by Heba Zaqout, artist and fine arts teacher, martyred 13 October 2023 with two of her children in Gaza. /episode/index/show/eastisapodcast/id/30738073