Dr. Ihab Saloul
dr. C. de Cesari
dr. N. Roei
dr. I.A.M. Saloul
External Members:
A.H. Sa'di Ben Gurion University)
C. Harders (FU Berlin)
F. Tufeili (Translator)
G. Amit (Levenski College of Education, Tel-Aviv)
G. Stemmrich (FU Berlin)
H. Dayan (UvA/AUC)
I. Soos (PhD candidate, FU Berlin)
J. Pearl (Academic College of Communication, Rishon LeZion)
N. Muller (Curator)
R. Zreik (Haifa University)
S. Harten (PhD candidate, FU Berlin)
S. Yousef (Artist)
Y. Bartana (Artist)
The modern Middle East has a rich yet violent history of occupation. Although
major military struggles and political shifts have been largely studied by
scholars in various fields, the impact of occupation on remembrance and heritage
(un-)making, including concurrent changes in cultural production and consumption
of memory, have been given far less attention.
Both the aftermath and the potential of the so-called “Arab Spring” have
challenged traditional paradigms for understanding the relationship between
culture and politics, and have opened up new sets of questions in both spheres.
“Revolution”, as both concept and practice, has at once enabled innovative modes
of critique, imaginings of new utopias, re-signified subjectivities, as well as
communal solidarities, civil society and local politics. This interdisciplinary
research group focuses on space and the politics of identity in the Middle East.
The group has a wide framework that conjoins notions of landscape and actual
issues and events. In the context of the recent spatial, transnational and
material turns in the humanities, we attempt to cross disciplinary and national
boundaries between different research communities in Europe and the Middle East
working in memory studies, literature, art history,
heritage studies, Holocaust studies, cultural studies, and political science.
The aim is to gain a deeper understanding of the interactions and tensions
between the politics and aesthetics of occupation, memory and heritage. Against
the theological history of progress, the research is directed towards the
analysis of cultural forms no longer as sites of sealed history that has been
permanently determined, but above all as vulnerable, fragile entities of an
ongoing present working its way through its convoluted past; entities that turn
history into a dense juncture of multiple past and future cultural and political
compositions, revealing the way opened between actuality and potentiality,
remembering and forgetfulness, speech and silence, image and the impossibility
of representation, history and imagination. Primary research questions include:
2-3 PhD dissertations, Journal articles & book chapters, 1 edited volume, workshops & expert meetings, seminars and public lectures, as well as NWO/ERC grant proposal.
2014 - 2018
The subject is both scientifically and politically urgent and will have audience in different academic fields across the humanities and social sciences, especially with regard to questions such as: How are intellectuals, artists, institutional actors and the broader public beginning to rethink the idea of culture as a public good in light of the complex tensions between the effects of global economy and the marketplace on the one hand, and established practices of ‘managed’ national culture on the other? How are we to define public culture in this context? And how can we begin to map out a revolutionary genealogy of cultural practice relevant to both the changing political landscapes of the 21st century as well as the ways in which cultural forms inflect political imaginaries.