Book launch in Melbourne - Saree Makdisi, Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation

PALESTINE INSIDE OUT: AN EVERYDAY OCCUPATION

By Professor Saree Makdisi (UCLA)  

FRIDAY, 6TH JUNE, 2008

7PM

:::::BOOK LAUNCH:::::

By Professor Ella Shohat (New York University)

UNIVERSITY OF MELBOURNE

ECONOMICS AND COMMERCE BUILDING

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This book is not about suicide bombers.

Tending one's fields, visiting a relative, going to the hospital: for ordinary Palestinians, such everyday activities require negotiating permits and passes, curfews and closures, "sterile roads" and "seam zones" — bureaucratic hurdles ultimately as deadly as outright military incursion.

In devastating detail, Saree Makdisi reveals how the "peace process" institutionalized Palestinians' loss of control over their inner and outer lives.

He shows how Israel's massive concrete walls going up around Gaza and the West Bank isolate communities from their lands, their livelihoods, and each other.

Through eye-opening statistics and day-by-day reports, we learn how Palestinians have seen their hopes for freedom and statehood culminate in the creation of abject "territories" comparable to open-air prisons.

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VIDEO: Saree Makdisi on the One State Solution

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Saree Makdisi received his PhD from the Program in Literature at Duke University in 1993. He is the author of Romantic Imperialism: Universal Empire and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge University Press, 1998) and William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003). His primary area of research is the culture of modernity, especially as it was consolidated in Britain during the Romantic period, and as it developed in relation to the changing dynamics of British imperialism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

In addition to his work on British literature and imperial culture, Professor Makdisi has also written extensively on the twentieth and twenty-first century consequences of eighteenth and nineteenth century imperialism. He has been especially interested in the cultural politics of the contemporary Arab world, about which he has written a number of articles for such scholarly journals as boundary 2 and Critical Inquiry, as well as edited volumes. In the spirit of speaking not only to a relatively narrow circle of scholars sharing a common expertise but to a broader public as well, he has written a number of articles on contemporary events which have appeared in such venues as The Los Angeles Times, The Nation and the London Review of Books, and have been widely translated into other languages. He is also the author of Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation, which will be published by Norton in May 2008.

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Ella Shohat is Professor in the departments of Art and Public Policy and Middle Eastern Studies, and is also affiliated with Comparative Literature and the Gender and Sexuality Studies Program. She has published and lectured extensively, both nationally and internationally, on issues having to do with cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and visual culture. More specifically,she has developed critical approaches to the study of Arab-Jews and the Mizrahim.