December 2021-Birzeit: The Palestinian Museum organised its third annual conference “Palestine: Producing Knowledge, Producing Futures” on the Birzeit University campus, in partnership with Birzeit University’s Department of Social and Behavioral Science and the Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research-Haifa.
The Museum held the conference in accompaniment with its current exhibition, A People by the Sea: Narratives of the Palestinian Coast (1748-1948), which is grounded in the narrative of the rise of Akka (Acre) in the eighteenth century, the rise of Yaffa (Jaffa) in the nineteenth century, the economic centralisation of coastal cities, the growth of European influence, and finally, the Nakba and “destruction of the country” in the twentieth century.
The papers presented to the conference provided a basic foundation for a reading of the Palestinian coast today, repositioning it within the wider socio-political and cultural Palestinian context by linking its materiality and future(s) to the reality of Palestine from the river to the sea. The conference focuses on the processes of Palestinian knowledge production and its relationship to local and global liberation discourse and its practices. Based on this foundation, the conference is based on a set of questions, such as: How do we think about Palestine, and how do we research it? How is Palestine produced and reproduced in research? These questions can begin to be answered through addressing the discourse of indigeneity, as presented by settler colonial studies given by its horizons, borders, and cultural and political approaches.
First Session
Director General of the Museum Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, PhD, opened the conference with a speech in which she said “This conference is taking place within the Museum's latest strategy, which officially began three years ago. Within these three years, we have launched a knowledge programme that is implementing the Museum's vision to produce and disseminate emancipatory knowledge-enhancing experiences about Palestine and its culture, history and people, as well as the production of knowledge represented by combining individual expertise with documentary material.” Laïdi-Hanieh went on to add that “The Museum organises academic events throughout the year, and continues to provide culture-oriented research grants to fill in knowledge gaps on Palestinian art history.”
The conference began with an opening lecture by writer, historian and president of Birzeit University Dr Beshara Doumani, entitled “A History of Palestinian Futures,” in which he said that “Historical narratives are distinguished by the fact that they derive their existence from the
present and have a future orientation. Therefore, the past represents a constantly contested field between modes of knowledge production that privilege certain times, places and social groups.” Doumani also posited reflections on the current exhibition, particularly on the experience of Daher al-Omar al-Zaydani as a figure who established a modern historical transformation.
Second Session
The second session, entitled "On Questioning Methodologies", was launched in partnership with the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University. Dr Lena Meari, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences and the Institute of Women’s Studies at Birzeit University, began the session with a discursive intervention entitled “Knowledge Production and Feminist Anti-Colonial Methodologies”, in which she spoke on the colonialism of knowledge, academic complicity with global imperialism, and how the neo-colonial era has provided other ways of cognitive dominance, where even debates about epistemological issues in colonial countries are often rooted in or borrowing from Western discourse rather than indigenous peoples. Meari also focused on emancipatory feminist knowledge production, and the ways in which anti-colonial feminism engages with knowledge patterns produced from the colonial reality.
Within the same session, Dr Rana Barakat, Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Birzeit University and Director of the Birzeit University Museum, presented a lecture entitled “Indigeneity or Indigenous? A Question of Methodology”, which suggested that more questions be asked rather than more theoretical material be produced or specific approaches presented. Barakat denoted that she, like other researchers, have focused on the term "knowledge production" and expressed, as both external and self-criticism, that the wide use of this term ends up invalidating its meaning and thus undermines knowledge acquisition. She went on to emphasise that it is vital to think about the following questions when talking about “the production of knowledge”, namely: For whom do we produce knowledge? How do we use the terms 'indigenous' and 'indigeneity'? These questions are within the framework of broader questions, such as: Why history? Why settler colonialism? Why indigenous? Why use the term indigeneity? Barakat presented these questions within the context of Palestine as a whole.
Dr Ala Alazzeh, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology and Chair of the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University, followed with an intervention entitled “Time, Temporality and Methodology in the Study of Palestine and Palestinians” on the cultural understanding of time and its connection to the present era. Alazzeh considered time as both a representation and reading of society, as it is created and understood through social frameworks. In Palestine, time is understood through power relations, and he posited that the flow and acceleration of events create complications, with segments of society unable to deal
with this acceleration, and with the inability to understand temporality leading to a fragmentation of the self. Alazzeh concluded by saying that the past is read from the eyes of the present and is shaped by perceptions of the future.
Third Session
The third session was entitled “Political and Cultural Approaches to Settler colonialism in Palestine” in partnership with the Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research-Haifa. It began with Dr Abaher el-Sakka, Associate Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University, presenting a lecture entitled “How may we analytically and methodologically read colonisation/coloniality, from the First Colony of 1948 to the Second Colony in 1967, and with what tools?”. El-Sakka focused on the methodological difficulties associated with research approaches due to the different representations and practices in one colonial context, as this has resulted in different legal, political, economic and social outputs within the two colonies at the level of colonial discourses and practices. He asks questions such as: Shall we continue to deal with the structures and formulations produced by these colonial classifications? What are the possible mechanisms to overcome them cognitively, methodologically and within research?
This was followed by Dr Mai Albzour, Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at Birzeit University and her discursive intervention entitled “The Concept of Normalisation within the Structure of Settler colonialism in Palestine”. In it, Albzour postulated that normalisation has levels within the Arab context, and its definition is different within the borders of “Mandate Palestine” than outside it, including the governmental and popular levels. She points to an acceleration in the pace of official normalisation by various Arab governments while most under their rule reject it. Overall, it was found that 87% of the Arabs still reject normalisation with Israel. Her paper concluded that official normalisation practices appeared before the term began to circulate, but that these practices were not stigmatised as normalisation at the time.
The session concluded with a discursive intervention by Dr Mohanad Mustafa, General Director of Mada al-Carmel Arab Center for Applied Social Research-Haifa, entitled “The May 2021 Uprising and the Erasure of the Green Line from Land and Consciousness”. In it, Mustafa spoke about the Second Intifada in 2000 as perhaps the most significant event for ’48 Palestinians (or Palestinians within the Occupied “interior” as commonly referred to by Palestinians in Arabic) since the Nakba. He posits that three transformations emerged at this stage, the first: the transition from a state of Palestinian disappearance to a state of permanent awakening, the second: the shift from a state of separation and exclusion from the Israeli economic and political system to a state of assimilation within these systems, the third: from the policies of complete negligence for culture to audacious recognition. These three stages produced representations that contradict the colonial situation as an all-encompassing historical event, demonstrating that despite all attempts to the contrary, ’48 Palestinians are integral to the situation of colonisation and not an exception as compared to other Palestinians. Mustafa draws comparisons between the Second Intifada and the May 2021 Uprising to demonstrate how Palestinian society is comprised of groups of Palestinians acting collectively as one.
Fourth Session
The fourth session, “Emancipatory Discourse and Cultural Practice” was introduced by Assistant Curator to the Exhibition “A People by the Sea” Ahmad Al-Aqra, during which he focused on the three main sections of the exhibition: The Urbanisation of Akka, the rise of Jaffa, and the Nakba. The first section was based on the structural changes achieved by Daher Al-Omar al-Zaydani, while the second and transitional section focused on the Ottoman Tanzimat, the resulting land registration laws, and the impact they had on the lives of citizens. As for the third section, entitled "Jaffa, the Heart of the Mediterranean", Al-Aqra discussed Jaffa as the most significant city on the Levantine coast. He also discussed the interactive map available in the exhibition, which elucidated the economic dimension of the aforementioned three stations. This dimension included the cotton and orange production processes and their associated transformations, including but not limited to population changes.
This was followed by Palestinian theatre actor and director Amer Hlehel’s discursive intervention entitled “The Theatricalisation of Memory”: Between Conformity to Art and Fidelity to History”. During which, Hlehel presented reflections on theatrical writing on historical topics, and said: “I am not interested in events or the celebration of heroism in history. Art is meant to pose questions about the meaning of existence and the meaning of life. The artist cannot answer. He is not technically interested in what year, for example, Daher Al-Omar Al-Zaydani was besieged, but rather thinks and cares about what Al-Zaydani and his companions could have been thinking at the time. As an artist I wish to explore how they spoke, what they ate, who was loyal at that time, who was afraid, and what Daher was secretly saying to himself. I do not care about the war leaders and who won which battle, I care about the soldiers who were forced to fight these wars without even understanding their causes.”
The last intervention was a poetry reading presented by the poet Ali Mawasi, entitled “A Sea Spilled onto the Tiles of Yaffa”. It included two poems, one of which was written following his visit to the “A People by the Sea” exhibition.
Mawasi praised the Museum's initiative to allocate a poetic reading within an academic conference, stressing the importance and beauty of the presence of art in various knowledge forums in Palestine, rather than viewing knowledge-based initiatives and art as mutually exclusive.
In the Fall of 2022, the Museum will issue a publication comprised of the research papers presented at the conference. It will also include a set of research interventions and cognitive reflections made during the years 2019-2022 by a group of researchers in the Museum’s Research, Knowledge, and Programmes Department. Furthermore, the conference in full will be made available on the Palestinian Museum YouTube channel.
The exhibition A People by the Sea will continue until the end of October 2022. It is continuously accompanied by a public, educational, and knowledge programme renewed monthly and covering a variety of activities and topics.
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