Conflict, Memory, and Knowledge

Free 14-Week Online Seminar

 

 Hosted Online – Register Here

Every Tuesday, April 16 – July 16, 2024
2:00 – 3:30 PM CET

Co-Sponsored by Off University and Freie Universität Berlin’s Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East Master’s Program.

 

Course Description

This course proposes an inquiry into the academic and cultural experiences of writing and re-writing history in Palestine and Syria. It combines different approaches and intellectual schools and will span topics from the epistemic question of the “decolonizing” of knowledge, to the impact of today’s information revolution as a fact of cultural production and political representations.

The seminar emphasizes cross-disciplinary discussions related to the nature of both conflicts and their respective features. The contribution to national self-building will be explored through the lens of statelessness in the Palestinian case and the one-party State and subsequent civil war in the Syrian case. Participants will explore an original combination of dissent and subaltern literature, questioning the philosophical concept of civil society, as well as the legal and political definition of the State. The seminar will track evolutions and mechanisms of knowledge production in contexts of “exile”, “estrangement”, and “conflictual narratives”, as it explores alternative forms of expression and representations within visual arts, popular culture, and thriving personal and oral history accounts.

Sessions will be presented and discussed by both instructors with attention to students’ participation and the co-built and interactive progress of the course. Seminar sessions will include watching and discussing visual materials: visual arts, reviews of films and literature, documentary material, as well as experimental and class interaction experiences with OpenAI – ChatGPT.

Seminar Co-Leaders

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More Information

Off University creates new strategies to uphold and sustain academic life and knowledge threatened by anti-democratic and authoritarian regimes. It was established for and by academics from Turkey yet addresses itself to academics all over the world: academics who have been purged from their institutions, forced to resign, who are legally and politically persecuted, and even imprisoned because of their opinion and research.

Located in Germany, Off-University offers researchers and students with limited opportunity to move around freely an occasion to participate in online education. Off-University combines the good old ideal of academic freedom with state-of-the-art digital communication and collaboration opportunities. Off-University’s mission is based on its commitment to peace in the world and to living together in diversity. It therefore seeks to develop emancipatory education-research activities that are less hierarchial and more democratic.

The Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East (ISME) Master’s Program at Freie Universität Berlin is a two-year, tuition-free, full-time master’s program taught in English on the campus in Berlin.

Freie Universität’s expertise in cultural studies of the Middle East – represented by Arabic Studies, Iranian Studies, Islamic Studies, Jewish Studies, Kurdish Studies, Ottoman Studies, Semitic Studies, and Turcology – comes together for this master’s program to offer students the possibility to approach this fascinating and complex region from multi-faceted and interregional perspectives taking into account the diversity of languages, literatures, societies, religions, and cultures of this region.

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Schedule, Syllabus, and Readings

Week 1: April 16	Introduction: Conflict, Knowledge, and Memory: Cases from Palestine and Syria
Week 2: April 23	Palestinian Historical Production as a Decolonial Case Reading materials:  Said, Edward W. 1992. The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books Edition. Miranda Fricker. 2007. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. 1st edition. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press. Nur Masalha. 2012. The Palestine Nakba. Decolonizing History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory. London: Zed Books.  Nur Masalha. 2018. Palestine. A Four Thousand Year History. London: Zed Books
Week 3: April 30	Independence & Autonomy from Legal and Constitutional Standpoints Reading materials:  Alabsi, Mohamad Moustafa. 2021 “What does the future hold for Middle Eastern states?”. Available at https://theconversation.com/what-does-the-future-hold-for-middle-eastern-states-166866   Dabashi, Hamid 2012. The Arab Spring: The End of Postcolonialism. Zed Books Ltd. Mallat, Chibli. 2007. Introduction to Middle Eastern Law. Oxford University Press.
Week 4: May 7	Social and Political Representations under the One-Party State: The Case of the Baath Regimes in Iraq & Syria Reading materials:  Arendt, Hannah. 2017 (1951). The Origins of Totalitarianism. Penguin Classics. Fraenkel, Ernst. 1971. The Dual State. A contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship. Oxford University Press. Orwell, George. 1945. Animal Farm. Penguin Group.
Week 5: May 14	Memory and Conflictual/Shared Narratives Reading materials:  Abdo, Nahla, Masalha, Nur (Ed.). 2018. An Oral History of the Palestinian Nakba. London/NY, Zed Books. Bashir, Bashir, Goldberg, Amos. 2019. Introduction: The Holocaust and the Nakba: A New Syntax of History. New York: Columbia University Press. Pappe, Ilan (Ed.). 1999. The Israel/Palestine Question, 1-6. New York/London: Routledge. Pappe, Ilan, Hilal, Jamil. 2010. Across the Wall: Narratives of Israeli-Palestinian History. London/New York: I.B. Tauris.   Scham, Paul, Salem, Walid, Pogrund, Benjamin (Ed.). 2005. Shared histories: a Palestinian-Israeli dialogue. [Epub]. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press.
Week 6: May 21	Memory and History between Film and Novella: The Case of Return to Haifa Reading materials:  Kanafani, Ghassan. 2000 (reedited). Returning to Haifa. In Palestine’s children: Returning to Haifa and other stories (translated by Barbara Harlow & Karen E. Riley). Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers. Ferro, Marc. 1988. Cinema and History (translated by Naomi Greene). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Yaqub, Nadia. 2018. Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution. Austin: University of Texas Press.
Week 7: May 28	The End of the Syrian Arab Republic? Challenges of Syrian History Writing and Knowledge Production Since the Syrian War Watching and listening materials:  Documentary: Married to Islamic State: The Women Australia Doesn’t Want/ Four Corners. Available at ABC News In-Depth YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q_GIUbyyuRw  Documentary : Our Home In The Desert: Life Inside A Refugee Camps/ Real Stories. Part 1 is available at Real Stories YouTube page at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igPVUi2HeH0 Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0K71eER8QY0
Week 8: June 4	Writing Palestinian Life and Collective Identity Through Photography Reading materials:  Khalidi, Walid. 1984. Before Their Diaspora: A Photographic History of the Palestinians 1876-1948. Beirut: Institute for Palestine Studies.  Said, Edward W. 1986. After the Last Sky. Palestinian Lives. Faber & Faber. Sanbar, Elias. 2004. Les Palestiniens la photographie d’une terre et de son peuple de 1839 à nos jours. Paris: Hazan.
Week 9: June 11	Forms and Expressions of Syrian History (Re)Writing Since the Syrian Uprising in 2011 Reading materials:  Baker & Ümit Üngör, 2023. The Syrian Gulag: Inside Assad’s Prison System. I.B. Tauris. Boyd-Barrett, Oliver. 2022. Conflict Propaganda in Syria. Narrative Battles. Routledge. Munif, Yasser. 2020. The Syrian Revolution: Between the Politics of Life and the Geopolitics of Death. Pluto Press. Ümit Üngör & Shahhoud, 2022. “How a massacre of Nearly 300 in Syria Was Revealed”. Available at https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/how-a-massacre-of-nearly-300-in-syria-was-revealed/
Week 10: June 18	Visibilizing Palestinians Through Comic Books and Graphic Novels Reading materials:  Chute. Hillary. 2016. Disaster Drawn. Visual Witness, Comics, and Documentary Form. Harvard University Press. Massad, Joseph. 2007. “Permission to paint: Palestinian Art and the Colonial Encounter”. Art Journal, 66, 3: 126-33. Nabizadeh. Golner. 2020. Representation and Memory in Graphic Novels. NY/London: Routledge.
Week 11: June 25	Authoritarianism, Social Media and the Future of Political Representations in the Middle East Reading materials:  Al Ghazzi, Omar. 2014. « ‘‘Citizen Journalism’’ in the Syrian uprising: problematizing western narratives in a local context », Communication Theory, n°24, p. 435-454 Boëx, Cécile. 2021, « Les images de la révolte. Exactions et guerre médiatique en Syrie ». Available at: https://laviedesidees.fr/Les-images-de-la-revolte.html DENEUVILLE Allan, HERNÁNDEZ LÓPEZ Gala, RASMI Jacopo. 2022, « Un âge de nouvelles enquêtes », Multitudes, Vol. 4, n°89, p. 58-66. Jones, Marc Owen. 2022. Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East. Oxford University Press.
Week 12: July 2	New Media and the Visibilization of Palestinian Refugees: Netflix as Example Reading materials:  Brownlie, Siobhan, Abouddahab, Rédouane (Ed.). 2022. Figures of the Migrant. The roles of Literature and the Arts in Representing the Migrant and Migration. New York: Routledge.  Limov, Brad. 2020. « Click It, Binge It, Get Hooked: Netflix and the Growing U.S. Audience for Foreign Content », International Journal of Communication, 14. Lotz, Amanda D. 2020. « In between the global and the local: Mapping the geographies of Netflix as a multinational service », International Journal of Cultural Studies, vol. 24(2).
Week 13: July 9	Figures of the “Enemy” in Modern Middle Eastern Conflicts Reading materials:  Gershoni, Israel (dir.). 2014. Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion. University of Texas Press. Gray, Matthew. 2020. “Conspiracy Theories in The Middle East” In  Routledge Handbook of Conspiracy Theories. Routledge University Press.
Week 14: July 16	Presentations & Discussions of Students’ Final Papers