Looking back at a time when a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seemed possible, Sari Nusseibeh sits down with Dan Ephron

Students Organize for Syria at Columbia University are proud to host:

Yousef Shamoun and the Tarab Ensemble for a Night of Music from Aleppo. The concert will feature Muwashshahat and Qudud Halabiya as well as vocal and instrumental improvisations.

Professor Catherine Hall will deliver the annual Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture. From Hall's first reading of Orientalism, Edward Said's work has acted as an inspiration and a provocation to understand the other. Her focus has been on English imperial identities in the C18 and C19. She understands the effort to enter imaginatively the states of mind that have underpinned those identities as part of the project of 'unlearning' modes of cultural domination. In this lecture, Hall focuses on Edward Long, C18 slave-owner, family man, creole nationalist and historian, who's encyclopaedic History of Jamaica (1774) explicates pro-slavery politics. Long's imagined geographies, rooted both in his lived experience and his attempted theorisations of racial difference, constituted the Atlantic as a place of white power, made productive by enslaved black labour. His politics of place fixed England, Jamaica and Africa in a fateful triangle, secured by racial binaries of "White" and "Negro." Those binaries could only be sustained by disavowal, that practice of knowing and not knowing the humanity of others, that remains central to an understanding of racisms in the present.  

Join the Middle East Institute for its next Sharīʿa Workshop entitled: "Islamic Law As a Discursive Tradition" with a case study on court practices using the Islamic equivalent of "best interests of the child" legal principle. Our guest leading a discussion will be Dr. Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim of McGill University.

Are you looking for the chance to work on your Arabic speaking or listening skills? Come join us for our weekly gathering. This week we will feature a film in Arabic. Everyone is welcome.