Friday, May 16, 2014
12 p.m. – 1 p.m.
McKinney Conference Room, Watson Institute
Speaker: Jasmin Habib, Cultural Anthropologist from the University of Waterloo
Ethnographic analyses of the loss of Palestine usually focus on economic and political aspects, paying less attention to the emotional and cultural pain of that loss. In this respect, these analyses tend to anaesthetize the effects of colonial, militarized, and racialising processes. Although they have been unable to reclaim their lands by military force or political means, Palestinians continue to resist military occupation and the confiscation of their lands; and to defend their right to return. They have also been moved to write and to recite poetic expressions of their experiences, sharing the depth of their losses among themselves and others. Such poems write the life of Palestine into the memory and history of a world that has sought to make their experiences invisible. I trace such narrations of place and belonging in what I am calling an “ethnography of presence.”