I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identitie... more I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identities, Ali Rattansi sets out to challenge the constancy of representational narratives of self and identity that foreground the coherent and rationalist archetypes of modernist discourses. Disrupting the conscious logic of intention and rationality, Rattansi posits the imaginary space of the psychic as an orientation from which unconscious desires, splitting, disavowal, identifications, and ambivalence blur the boundaries between one person’s end and another’s beginning. Confronted with the interminable task of self-definition in uncertain times, ‘‘difference’’ helps to set the limits between self and another, policing the recognizable (and not-so-recognizable) periphery of that which is not ‘I.’ Difference lays the groundwork for subjectivity by ‘‘precariously identifying where the ‘I’ ends and unknowable other begins’’ (Pellegrini 7). In a critique of the ‘‘endlessly expanding enumeratio...
Chaos, a 2018 film by Sara Fattahi, a relatively new Syrian filmmaker based in Vienna, offered me... more 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 renowne... more "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
Charles Achilles, Eastern Michigan University and Seton Hall University Peter Afflerbach, Univers... more Charles Achilles, Eastern Michigan University and Seton Hall University Peter Afflerbach, University of Maryland Patricia Alexander, University of Maryland Richard Allington, University of Tennessee Donna Alvermann, University of ...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillan... more This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rathe...
Abstract The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true ... more 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... more "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... more 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 ... more 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.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2017
Born into a legacy of conflict, any Palestinian child over 7 will have already experienced three ... more 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 ... more 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 r... more ... 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 . ...
I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identitie... more I In an essay that sketches a postmodern geography of western racisms, ethnicities, and identities, Ali Rattansi sets out to challenge the constancy of representational narratives of self and identity that foreground the coherent and rationalist archetypes of modernist discourses. Disrupting the conscious logic of intention and rationality, Rattansi posits the imaginary space of the psychic as an orientation from which unconscious desires, splitting, disavowal, identifications, and ambivalence blur the boundaries between one person’s end and another’s beginning. Confronted with the interminable task of self-definition in uncertain times, ‘‘difference’’ helps to set the limits between self and another, policing the recognizable (and not-so-recognizable) periphery of that which is not ‘I.’ Difference lays the groundwork for subjectivity by ‘‘precariously identifying where the ‘I’ ends and unknowable other begins’’ (Pellegrini 7). In a critique of the ‘‘endlessly expanding enumeratio...
Chaos, a 2018 film by Sara Fattahi, a relatively new Syrian filmmaker based in Vienna, offered me... more 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 renowne... more "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
Charles Achilles, Eastern Michigan University and Seton Hall University Peter Afflerbach, Univers... more Charles Achilles, Eastern Michigan University and Seton Hall University Peter Afflerbach, University of Maryland Patricia Alexander, University of Maryland Richard Allington, University of Tennessee Donna Alvermann, University of ...
International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education
This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillan... more This paper reflects on a research-creation project that investigates the ways in which surveillance is experienced by youth as an embodiment that might be difficult to articulate in words but rathe...
Abstract The Idol by Palestinian filmmaker Hani Abu-Assad is a film that is inspired by the true ... more 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... more "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... more 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 ... more 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.
Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2017
Born into a legacy of conflict, any Palestinian child over 7 will have already experienced three ... more 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 ... more 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 r... more ... 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 . ...
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Books by Dina Georgis
Papers by Dina Georgis