The Revolutionary Afterlives of Palestinian Women Martyrs: Between Fact & Affect, Affect & Abjection
Key information
- Date
- Time
-
5:00 pm to 7:00 pm
- Venue
- Paul Webley Wing
- Room
- SG32
- Event type
- Seminar
About this event
Join us for a Comparative Political Thought talk by Professor Michaelle Browers.
Drawing upon concepts of affect as multiple valences that can be both positive and negative at the same time and of abjection as a state of exclusion from social norms and rules – as well as how those ideas have been theorised in intersectional ways – this paper critically analyses the powerful responses to the bodies of Palestinian women who resist Israeli aggression and their extended afterlives.
The analysis hones in on two women of the resistance from Nablus: Shadia Abu Ghazaleh (January 8, 1949 to November 28, 1968), a 19-year old who died after the bomb she was preparing in her home for a military operation against the Israeli occupation accidentally detonated and Lina al-Nabulsi (January 26, 1959 to May 15, 1976), a schoolgirl who was shot and killed by an Israeli soldier after participating in a demonstration against Israeli occupation and settlement building on her way home from school.
Drawing upon a wide variety of representations, in both Arabic and English, from press coverage to academic writings to artwork, Browers analyses the afterlives of images of and stories told about these two figures. These sources will form the basis for critically analysing the affective and abjective politics of this ongoing conflict, with attention to both how violence is embedded in – and what might be generative – in these processes.
Speaker
Michaelle Browers is Professor of Politics and International Affairs at Wake Forest University. She is the author of Political Ideology in the Arab World: Accommodation and Transformation (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Democracy and Civil Society in Arab Political Thought: Transcultural Possibilities (Syracuse University Press, 2006), and co-editor (with Charles Kurzman) of An Islamic Reformation? (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003). She has published widely and conducted research across the Middle East. Her current project examines generational consciousness in Nablus.
