Panels

Panel 1: (B)ordering Values: Time, Corporeality, Visuality and Waste 

“Evolution of Civilization: Temporal Borders in Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani’s Pan-Islamism.” – ALI A. OLOMI, PhD Candidate in History, UC Irvine

Abstract: This paper examines the notion of time and borders in the discourse on civilization at the heart of Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani’s Pan-Islamic project. Using a close historical reading of Al Afghani’s journal, al Urwat al-Wuthqa and his “Response to Ernest Renan” I examine his use of newspapers as media to both transmit and formulate his central thesis. Al-Afghani internalizes the language of the orientalist diagnosing the Middle East and sutures it on Ibn Khaldun’s concept of civilizations to argue that the Islamic world was undergoing a civilizational process the borders of which come up against the empires of Europe. By reinvigorating a rational Islam in a Pan-Islamic state, the Muslim world could progress on the rung of civilization. By unpacking the way in which Al-Afghani absorbs and repurposes the orientalist discourse on the Middle East and his use of Ibn Khaldun, I examine the anti-imperial project at the heart of his pan-Islamic prescription.

“On the Value of Depreciated Life” – MICHAEL DAHAN, PhD Student in Drama and Theater, UC Irvine 

Abstract: What kind of understanding about the value of human life—the criteria that might describe one life as valuable and another as devalued—can we derive from P.O.W. exchanges when they are performed as a fraught and unstable site of relation between Israel and Palestine?  This paper interrogates what the exchange of wartime prisoners might reveal about the trajectories of meaning—political, libidinal or otherwise—that are assigned to human life. By deploying a number of linguistic, economic, performative and theoretical models towards an analysis of the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, I will examine a military ritual whose operation is saturated with meaning, and one that functions as an elaboration of the coercive, bio-political function of prisons.  The prison, and by extension the prisoner exchange, constitute what, in Foucault’s formulation, are “the systems of punishment…situated in a certain political economy of the body… its forces, their utility and their docility, their distribution and their submission” (Foucault, “Docile Bodies”). As will emerge in the course of my argument, in the same instance that the disproportionate—and I will propose counter-productive—prisoner exchange of Gilad Shalit describes a marginalized and depreciated condition of existence for the Palestinian, it instigates a release of Palestinian prisoners (considered terrorists by Israeli account) that jeopardizes the security and stability of the Israeli state. By examining the performative capacity of exchange, I propose that these prisoner-swaps emerge as a form of differential judgment—a political valuation and overall depreciation of human life—that unleash a leakage of the unconscious, a drive towards what Bataille names an ‘expenditure without reserve,’ that turns the subject of the Israeli-Palestinian state out on itself, ejecting it outside the frame of its own ethical inside.

“Regarding the Pornography of Violence: Visual Erotics after 9/11” – SASHA CRAWFORD-HOLLAND, MA Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies, University of Southern California

Abstract: On April 6, 2017, Donald Trump ordered a military strike on a Syrian government airbase in what many lauded as his first presidential act. MSNBC chief anchor Brian Williams invoked Leonard Cohen in marveling at the “beauty” of these strikes, provoking Bill Maher to describe such images of explosions as “America’s money shot.” Maher was joking, but this presentation will take his claim seriously: what does it mean to use the language of pornography in describing images of imperial violence? Representations of sex and violence are both about (b)orders—about the limits of the body at the limits of representation, and about policing regimes of visibility, desire, and obscenity. Resistant to the ways that the word ‘pornography’ is often thrown around hyperbolically, this presentation interrogates how the discourse of pornography has mediated the War on Terror. By examining images of violence through the lens of porn studies, I consider how the desires to see and to know can be ordered according to a logic that rationalizes militarism. I give sustained attention to the photographs of the abuses committed at Abu Ghraib in 2003 and 2004—photographs that Jean Baudrillard, Wendy Brown, Rush Limbaugh, Donald Rumsfeld, Susan Sontag, and countless others described as being “pornographic.” In varying ways, these arguments all relied on conservative definitions of pornography that shifted the conversation from the radical asymmetry of American imperialism to a scandal about indecency. Here, the language of pornographyn was a ruse. I then suggest a more critical way that we can understand iconic images of the War on Terror to be pornographic. Like hardcore pornography, they are structured by a pornographic semiosis that mistakes excess for evidence, tactically deploying hypervisible spectacle to disavow that which remains out of sight. By scrutinizing the ways that violence is made to be pornographic, I critique the dominant forms of mediation that disarticulate violence from structures of imperial power.

“Empire and the Global Waste Trade in the Blue Barrel Grove” – SINTIA ISSA, PhD Candidate in Visual Studies, UC Santa Cruz 

Abstract: Though it begins in the (in)discipline of visual studies, my intervention is interdisciplinary and takes into account largely ignored ecological considerations in MENA-region analyses of empire. This paper is a preliminary exercise to rethink the bio-, eco-, and geopolitics of waste in its global and local dimensions through a close reading of The Blue Barrel Grove (2013–) by the Beirut-based artist Jessika Khazrik. Her ongoing investigative research and artistic practice, which includes texts, exhibition installations, interactive and sound performances, a poem and a play, revolve around an illegal toxic waste shipment that left Italy and ended up in Lebanon in 1987 during the civil war (1975–90). With insight from Achille Mbembe, I argue that the exile of toxic waste should be seen as a prolongation of imperial relations (Mbembe 2003), albeit with new forms of violence, including what Robert Nixon calls “slow violence.” I defend the idea that Khazrik is working against imperial histories and neocolonial relationships, excavating a situated iteration from Beirut and returning to toxic matter itself to imagine a new politics of resistance. I assert that the artist stages a confrontation between language and matter, just like she explores the complex and, at times, antagonistic relationships between evidence and witnessing, fact and fiction. Like Khazrik, I welcome the unruliness of matter, and celebrate the visualization and performance of its “vitality,” after Jane Bennett, in her work. These support matter’s capacity to enact a historical cut against the “biopolitics of disposability” under neoliberalism when other favorable conditions converge.

Respondent: Harry Hvdson (University of Southern California)

Panel 2: (B)ordering Sites: Bodies, Materialities, and Virtual Realities

Faculty Presenters:

“The Racial / Spatial Politics of Banning the Muslim Woman’s Niqab” – SHERENE RAZACK, Distinguished Professor and Penny Kanner Endowed Chair in Women’s Studies, University of California, Los Angeles 

Abstract: Bans, whether travel bans or bans on the wearing of the niqab in public space, mark Muslims as neither inside nor outside the law. They usher Muslims into a spatial void. Occupying a space where law has declared its own absence, the banned Niqabi is denied the right to public space even as she is formally a citizen. What do bans provide to those who are compelled to engage in it? Bans create a public that is made secure by the eviction of a threatening foreignness. To look at the niqab is to be altered, derailed from the path of racial and sexual mastery, and confronted with the possibility that we do not know, either who she is, or who we are. Faced with the prospect of alteration, we choreograph the encounter with Muslim women through bans on her apparel. Bans enable us to refuse to see, to block from our line of vision the sight that unsettles and that derails us from our plans of mastery. Understood as dreams of possession, bans preempt any recognition of the other’s humanity. But this pre-emption troubles and we are haunted by it. Our rage at niqabi women, expressed in the command “yield to me” conceals the ambivalence and desire that marks the encounter.

“Forced Out, Disinherited, and Confined: Colonial Settlement, Tree-planting, and Bedouin Dispossession in the Naqab”
GARY FIELDS, Associate Professor, Department of Communications, University of California, San Diego

“Algorithmic Borders in the Arab World”
LAILA SHEREEN SAKR, Assistant Professor in Film and Media Studies, Univeristy of California, Santa Barbara

Respondent: Mariam Rahmani, PhD Candidate in Comparative Literature, UCLA