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Democracy, Multicultural Citizenship and Participation Research Group Seminar Smadar Lavie March 10th, 2010, 15:00, CES Seminar Room, 2nd Floor, Coimbra
Cultural Studies has been an excellent move that is assumed to have assisted in the decolonizing of the humanities and social sciences, Cultural Anthropology included. The move, however, was mainly one way: the theory was formulated and articulated in the Western metropolitan universities, but the data came from "post"colonial situations, whether in the Third World or in "Third Worlded" Western metropolises. My presentation concerns Palestine/Israel, and is part of the larger project of the World Anthropologies Network Collective (WAN). The paper will shed light on the disciplined processes through which English-language cultural theory travels to and from Israel's intellectual spheres, and then shed light on the transcultural Hebrew-language theories that ought to travel from Palestine/Israel into the English-language sphere, and on the reasons for our urgent need to allocate funds for their Hebrew-to-English translations. Smadar Lavie is a cultural anthropologist, specializing in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine. She is the author of The Poetics of Military Occupation (Univ. of Calif. Press, 1990), co-editor of Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity (Duke Univ. Press, 1996), and of many scholarly and public articles. Her methodology and practice of anthropological research challenge the assumptions of the discipline’s inquiry and forms of ethnographic writing. For the 2009/10 academic year she is visiting as an Associate Professor at the Department for Studies in Women and Gender at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. Lavie is presently completing a book manuscript on Mizrahi women, Palestine, and the racial formation of Israel. The book illuminates on issues of social justice, the embodied aspects of the welfare society, and critique of the discourse on pluralism through Gloria Anzaldua’s theoretization of the somatic. A chapter of this book-in-progress, "Staying Put: Crossing the Isreal/Palestine Border with Gloria Anzaldua" has won the American Studies Association 2009 Gloria Anzaldua award. |