Dina Georgis

Chaos, a 2018 film by Sara Fattahi, a relatively new Syrian filmmaker based in Vienna, offered me an opportunity to pause and to think differently about trauma and memory, a topic that I’ve been writing about for over 20 years. The Syrian war which began in 2011 and continues into the present is not at all represented in graphic or disturbing images of war. Quite the contrary, the camera focuses on the women and their activities at home which are not particularly eventful. The film is slow to move, quiet, and repetitive. The story of the women’s experiences of violence and loss is told in small morsels of the their truth. I would describe the impact of the film to be unnerving. The encounters we witness as viewers offer an opportunity to connect with a range of affects reflecting Sigmund Freud’s originary observations of the psychic states of traumatic experience; namely, the traumatized are either numb to pain and are unable to narrativize their experience and when the wounds find expression, it can feel like they have no power against pain.

"This catalogue marks the first solo exhibition in Canada of work by internationally renowned artist Akram Zaatari. Addressing the complex history of the civil conflict in Lebanon, the publication explores the precarious status of archives in times of war, as well as their discursive limits as narrators of Lebanon’s history. " -- publisher's website

Abstract The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true story of Mohammed Assaf, a young man from Gaza who became a sensation in Palestine when he won the Arab Idol contest in 2013. Abu-Assad's rendition of the story in The Idol is not faithful to real life, but instead offers an affective lens to Assaf's extraordinary rise to fame. My paper will argue that Palestinian attachment to Assaf expresses an enigmatic longing for hope. Notwithstanding articulable desires for better futures under unbearable socio-political realities of everyday life in Gaza, Assaf's journey to fame offered not so much optimism for a better future but the affective space for Palestinians to dream and playfully come together. Dubbed “Palestine's Dream,” Assaf's success sparked a desire in Palestinians to feel joy. In the film, Assaf's inspiration was his defiant and gender queer sister. Theorizing her defiance through D.W. Winnicott's ideas on the origins of creativity, play, and a “good enough environment,” this paper claims that her queer affect is transmitted to her brother as an ineffable wish for something otherwise. In this way, The Idol posits the source of hope in imaginative creation in excess of familiar narratives.

"Special Works School transforms Gallery TPW into the speculative workshop of a surveillance artist. Throughout the gallery, objects and experiments stage the problems and possibilities of camouflage, and the accompanying video delves into its multi-sensory potential through an operatic, polyphonic exchange. Through this new body of work, Bambitchell asks: what is the sound, feel, and smell of surveillance? What does an aesthetic approach to surveillance render visible or, indeed, invisible? Framing surveillance as an aesthetic practice, Special Works School hones in on its psychic, material, and embodied dimensions, working from the positions of both surveillor and surveilled." -- Publisher's website.

This paper examines the psychic topography of identities of belonging for their sustainability in a plural world. By drawing on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, I will think about how collective identities are symbolic reconstructions of traumatic pasts and therefore foreclose their hybrid or cosmopolitan origins. While such insight demands a politic of generosity that considers the psychic ‘‘necessities’’ of stable racial identities, it also demands that we be aware of how the psychic mechanisms of survival, and the narratives and the ontologies they produce, might no longer serve their communities, or the communities with which they come into contact, well. Dissatisfied with Edward Said’s postmodern/postcolonial response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Freud and the Non-European, this paper offers a viewpoint that imagines political responses from the affective site of human loss and injury.

Critical of Lebanese officialdom's response to the civil war, Akram Zaatari is among a group of war-generation artists have been aesthetically archiving the war. Interested in unearthing and salvaging the forgotten or queer remains of war, the aesthetic interventions of Akram Zaatari, on whom this paper will focus, document and archive™ the quotidian, the discrepant and the discarded. Important to his aesthetic practice is an intimacy with the objects he collects for his creations. What brings him to his objects is not so much an intention or a plan, but a queer curiosity, which sends him on a journey of discovery to unearth buried and untold pasts. Queer here is not defined through identity but the traces of dangerous and libidinal relationalities that set the stage for radical hope and political repair.

Born into a legacy of conflict, any Palestinian child over 7 will have already experienced three wars in their lifetime. Growing up amidst the ruins of war and the anticipation of its re-emergence, Palestinian children have a complex relationship to history and to the memory of violence. In Gaza, childhood innocence does not offer protection from racial hatred or ethnic cleansing. In July 2014, only 5 years after the last major assault, Gaza experienced a 7-week military invasion, which caused mass displacement, the destruction of architecture, and shortages of food, water, and medicine. Many international news sources visually represented the horrors of this war with pictures of Palestinian children. Images of children lying under rubble, some of whom have lost limbs or have just taken a final breath in the arms of a parent were chosen to represent the plight of Palestinians. In the stories that appear alongside these images, we read of women giving birth under bombardment of bombs and shrapnel, of children killed while sleeping, while playing on a beach, while feeding pigeons on the roof of their home, and while seeking shelter in a school turned into a refugee camp. It is assumed that for the adult who is meant to consume these images and stories, confrontation with knowledge of children’s pain and the trauma experienced will provoke a response: a wake-up call to the senselessness of Israel’s attack of Gaza, which killed 495 children according to the United Nations (UN) calculation, wounding and traumatizing thousands more. When it comes to children, and in this case dying children, most adults will feel affected in some way. Not surprising, the worldwide reaction to the images and calls to protect Gazan children had the effect of communicating that the “Israeli war machine has no regard for children or humanity” (Wahad 2014). Using heavy and very sophisticated weaponry against a vastly unarmed population, Israel’s capacity for cruelty were laid bare. The hope that perhaps some imagined could come out of this tragedy was that Palestinian vulnerability, a truth that has been vastly resisted, would become more palpable with Israel’s abuse of power in the killing, wounding, and traumatizing of children. This article will conceptually unpack the status of the child in the context of the 2014 war on Gaza. As a symbol of innocence and futurity, the child arguably became instrumentalized to win the hearts of people, encouraging none defined

This article takes up Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red (1998) as an allegory for the discarded history of queerness. The novel in verse rewrites the Greek myth of Herakles (Hercules) and the red-winged monster Geryon as a queer love story. In Carson’s rendition, Herakles is not a colonizer who murders Geryon to seize his red cattle but a lover who steals and breaks his fragile heart. Born hybrid in a modern-day context, Geryon struggles with narrating his life in words and instead takes pictures. By asking us to pay attention to history’s queer affective traces, Carson invites us to think about how bodies become discarded social monsters and how monsters must learn to live in their bodies. She turns our attention to the traumas and their affects that render the activities of subjectivity unpredictable and undecipherable. In Autobiography of Red, “queer” is not simply sexual orientation but the abject perversions of difference, not easily nameable. Without the familiar registers of identity, we are invited to witness and to be touched by Geryon’s life through his photo-autobiography, which captures the affect of experience, otherwise lost to the foreclosures of time.

... For me, they mark an epistemological opening in how to think about terrorists. ... View all references) helped me return to my confused and unintegrated memory of men. ... The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation and Hidden Grief . ...

This paper turns to Rabih Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking, a one-man multimedia performance, for its capacity to enable us to think about the dilemmas of narrativizing the Lebanese civil war. Critical of Lebanon's official position to move on and forget the war, Mroué presents his audience with his unofficial and personal archive of war, collected over the years without any purpose in mind. His archive consists of random objects, fragments of memory, which speak more to his affective relationship than to the certainty of his experience. Contradiction, hesitation, and pain are what organize his narrative. Indeed, what Mroué delivers to his audience is the vulnerable and fallible human in history. The audience is invited to witness the singularity of a man torn by a nagging memory of his own complicity in the war. Mroué's Make Me Stop Smoking is an invitation to visit the archive and be suspicious of its desires. Archival objects, left unexamined, have the power to construct and stabilize narratives. Hence, a living archive, argues the author, requires an interest in death and in mourning the objects to which one becomes inflexibly attached.

This article offers a reading of the groundbreaking bookBareed Mista3jil: True Stories, a collection of the narratives of Lebanese queers. Here, I argue, a burgeoning collective queer experience is being mapped from the conditions of Western imperialism and globalization, from the legacies of a colonial past, and from everyday life in postwar Lebanon. Resisting the urge to reduce Arab queer identities as either Western or traditionally Arab, the article suggests that though Western constructions of sexualities have certainly been influential, these identities are also responding to the local and cultural context. If we attune our readings to the affects that underlie the stories in this collection, it becomes clear that the emotional strategies to survive and negotiate the difficulties of postcoloniality are different from the strategies of post-Stonewall pride culture. Rather than stifle shame with the insistence of queer pride, this community is creating itself by expressing its s...

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial ‘crashing’ captures what happens when we act out from experiences

In Ann-Marie McDonald’s Fall on Your Knees, the tensions of migration and hybridity are configured through the perversity of desire and narratives of trauma. The story is set in a mining town in Cape Breton Island and represents a complexly diverse Canada, replete with scandal, hatred, and slippery racial dynamics. When this affect is unbound, it returns not only to the lost time of past racial traumas but also to the lost time of sexual traumas. Trauma’s repetitions are, however, always a distortion because memory is, as Cathy Caruth puts it, ‘‘a filtering of the original event through the fiction of traumatic repression’’ (15). The original event of trauma can, therefore, only be performed, never repre­sented. Said differently, although the terrors of history, such as slavery, are unspeakable, they are not, as Paul Gilroy suggests, inexpressible (73).1

Much of Brands writing has grappled with questions of national belonging. In works such as In Another Place Not Here and Land to Light On, she demonstrates the paradoxes of national identities by staging the tension between national yearning and the fragmentations of identity when ...

This paper works with Nietzsche’s concept of ressentiment because it offers important insights into the implications of anachronistic feminist epistemologies of freedom that are built on, as Wendy Brown argues, attachments to wounded identities. Injured by power, second and third-wave feminism’s response to loss is to assert the right to power and empowerment. As this strategy forecloses loss and human vulnerability, it renders feminism unable to respond adequately to war and contemporary political conflict. Drawing on postcolonial questions of loss and suffering in conversation with ressentiment, I suggest that feminism can begin to unlearn what Stuart Hall has called “our habits of mind.” To elucidate what a new feminism that is “touched by loss” might look like, I turn to Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and post-9/11 responses to advance the politics of grief and mourning.

This paper reads Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles the coming of age of a Moroccan boy through its queer affects. Set in both Morocco and Switzerland, Taïa’s protagonist is neither a victim nor oppressed by the socio-economic and patriarchal conditions of his existence. His sexuality is naive and perverse, exploited and exploitative. Queer knowledge in this film breaks down at many levels. The effect of this confusion is the film’s insistence on reading the narrative outside of easy sexual epistemologies. This paper defines “queer” not simply in terms of sexual orientation but as an affective relationship to loss. Borne from the traces of sexual being, queer affects resist the domestication of the sexual for social recognition. They are the parts of us that refuse to be colonized into affable, upright subjects. In Salvation Army, the protagonist grows up to be gay, as we have come to understand this word, but his subjectivity remains ambiva...

This article reads Dionne Brand’s novel, What We All Long For, and her book of poetry, Inventory, as chronicles of diasporic life in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks. Under new racialized terrains, we encounter difficult negotiations and complex subjecthoods. Her texts call us to the affective registers of loss and trauma and resist postcolonial optimism. Indeed, Brand’s work is attentive to postcolonial tragedy. Following David Scott, this paper offers tragedy as an alternative concept to redemptive resistance and allows us to reflect on subjects suffering in historical crisis.

... View full textDownload full text Full access. DOI: 10.1080/10714410600739897 Dina Georgis pages 165-178. ... View all references, 352)?” When they both say they think the story with the animals is the better story, he replies “Thank you, and so it is with God” (Martel 200211. ...

The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true story of Mohammed Assaf, a young man from Gaza who became a sensation in Palestine when he won the Arab Idol contest in 2013. Abu-Assad's rendition of the story in The Idol is not faithful to real life, but instead offers an affective lens to Assaf's extraordinary rise to fame.

My paper will argue that Palestinian attachment to Assaf expresses an enigmatic longing for hope. Notwithstanding articulable desires for better futures under unbearable socio-political realities of everyday life in Gaza, Assaf's journey to fame offered not so much optimism for a better future but the affective space for Palestinians to dream and playfully come together. Dubbed “Palestine's Dream,” Assaf's success sparked a desire in Palestinians to feel joy. In the film, Assaf's inspiration was his defiant and gender queer sister. Theorizing her defiance through D.W. Winnicott's ideas on the origins of creativity, play, and a “good enough environment,” this paper claims that her queer affect is transmitted to her brother as an ineffable wish for something otherwise. In this way, The Idol posits the source of hope in imaginative creation in excess of familiar narratives.

This paper reads Abdellah Taïa’s Salvation Army, a semi-autobiographical film that chronicles the coming of age of a Moroccan boy through its queer affects. Set in both Morocco and Switzerland, Taïa’s protagonist is neither a victim nor oppressed by the socio-economic and patriarchal conditions of his existence. His sexuality is naive and perverse, exploited and exploitative. Queer knowledge in this film breaks down at many levels. The effect of this confusion is the film’s insistence on reading the narrative outside of easy sexual epistemologies. This paper defines “queer” not simply in terms of sexual orientation but as an affective relationship to loss. Borne from the traces of sexual being, queer affects resist the domestication of the sexual for social recognition. They are the parts of us that refuse to be colonized into affable, upright subjects. In Salvation Army, the protagonist grows up to be gay, as we have come to understand this word, but his subjectivity remains ambivalent and in mourning.

This article offers a reading of the groundbreaking book Bareed Mista3jil: True Stories, a collection of the narratives of Lebanese queers. Here, I argue, a burgeoning collective queer experience is being mapped from the conditions of Western imperialism and globalization, from the legacies of a colonial past, and from everyday life in postwar Lebanon. Resisting the urge to reduce Arab queer identities as either Western or traditionally Arab, the article suggests that though Western constructions of sexualities have certainly been influential, these identities are also responding to the local and cultural context. If we attune our readings to the affects that underlie the stories in this collection, it becomes clear that the emotional strategies to survive and negotiate the difficulties of postcoloniality are different from the strategies of post-Stonewall pride culture. Rather than stifle shame with the insistence of queer pride, this community is creating itself by expressing its suffering from the effects of shame and social humiliation. The narrative thread that comes through is not pride but hope. That is because shame, as Elspeth Probyn contends, gives access to what is most important and, as Eve Sedgwick has argued, is a resource for imagining change.

This article examines Rawi Hage's (2006) De Niro's Game and Hany Abu-Assad's (2005) Paradise Now for their capacity to give us insight into the meanings of racialized masculinities. Neither text represents a very consoling picture of men in war and conflict, but they have a great deal to teach us about the fragility that underpins masculinity in volatile political contexts. Indeed, they give us insight into the affective realities of racial traumas that inhabit our constructions of identity, ideological positionalities, and cultural representation. Inspired by Frantz Fanon's (1952) plea for a new humanism and Paul Gilroy's (2005) assertion that we attend to and politicize human suffering, I propose a psychoanalytic aesthetics of loss as a model for understanding and renewing cultural and political life. My method demands that we recognize that aesthetic cultural texts have an emotional source and that “being touched” by affect might teach us how to become better readers of our time.

Informed by the critical humanisms of Hannah Arendt, Frantz Fanon, and Paul Gilroy, the authors argue for an orientation to teaching and learning that troubles the continuing effects of dehumanizing race logic. Reflecting on Paul Haggis's Oscar award winning film Crash from 2004, they suggest that the metaphor of racial ‘crashing’ captures what happens when we act out from experiences of racial injury instead of being touched by it. They propose a psychoanalytic pedagogy of emotions as a method for reading representation beyond the limits of detached rational critique. Learning from the affect of racial injury as it is made manifest in representation, they suggest, is an important ethical starting point for generating new insights into what it might mean to live within and beyond contemporary legacies of racial hatred.