About Marianna Reis

Marianna Reis is a graduate of the MESAAS MA program at Columbia University.  Her research interests include Palestinian identity, diaspora, and cinema.  She is currently conducting research on representations of identity in political cartoons featured in Palestinian newspapers during the First and Second Intifadas.

Recording: A Public Conversation between Professor Hamid Dabashi and Professor Ashis Nandy

The recording is now available for the public conversation between Prof. Hamid Dabashi and Prof. Ashis Nandy.

The two eminent scholars raised crucial questions revolving around the theme of “state, culture, and human imagination.”  Professor Dabashi and Professor Nandy brought to this discussion their respective conceptions of these central ideas.  Of particular interest was the nature of the modern state and its viability within the context of changing epistemological, discursive, and temporal spaces.  Professor Nandy suggests that the advent of the modern state has wreaked devastation upon societies by imposing the necessity of a cultural homogenization project.  Building upon this idea, Professor Dabashi questions the viability of the modern state, in the Weberian sense, suggesting that the amorphous state has a greater tolerance for critical thinking than a totalitarian nation-state. The public conversation between Professor Dabashi and Professor Nandy is crucial to Baraza’s own work, which seeks to imagine – and create – a space that not only facilitates engagement within the geographic and disciplinary boundaries of Area Studies. It also encourages the production of new discursive modes around which these engagements can be centered.

Continue reading Recording: A Public Conversation between Professor Hamid Dabashi and Professor Ashis Nandy

The Good Fight: Combating Misconceptions of Islamic Studies

islamic_04042012A recent feature article published in the McGill Daily–my alma mater’s independent newspaper–recounted the detainment of Islamic Studies PhD student Pascal Abidor during a trip home to New York from Montreal via Amtrak. Abidor presented his passport to the border patrol officers as the train entered the United States, and when asked where he lived and why, Abidor explained that he was a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at McGill University.

This was enough to arouse the suspicion of the officers, who then looked through files on his laptop and found images of Hamas and Hezbollah rallies. Abidor explained these were a part of his research on Shiism in contemporary Lebanon. Abidor was then removed from the train, handcuffed, detained, and interrogated.

Continue reading The Good Fight: Combating Misconceptions of Islamic Studies

Good War/Bad Terror: Morality, Violence, and the (De)Valuation of Palestinian Life

gaza_03212012Last Friday, the Israeli Air Force killed two members of the Palestinian Resistance Committee in Gaza, who were believed to be planning an attack on Israel from the Egyptian Sinai some time in the following days. This sparked an onslaught of rocket attacks from Gaza into Southern Israel, and Israeli airstrikes on Gaza, with civilian and militant casualties on both sides. In the wake of the attacks, Israeli journalist Larry Derfner, in an article in +972 Magazine, chose to address a common justification for military violence by the state of Israel, that “Palestinians have no right to lift a finger against our control of their lives and land,” and called for a rejection of the idea that “we [Israel] will always be totally innocent, while they will always be totally guilty.” Continue reading Good War/Bad Terror: Morality, Violence, and the (De)Valuation of Palestinian Life

Palestine and the Fight for Water Access

“Israel is a small piece of land. We are not even 1 percent of the Arab space, you know. We don’t have water. We don’t have oil. Our greatness, if one may say greatness, stems from the fact we had nothing to start with. So we turned to human talent because there weren’t natural resources. The Arabs can do it too.” – Shimon Peres, Foreign Policy (March/April 2012 issue)

wateracess_03192012If by “human talent” the Israeli President meant illegally and unfairly managing water access for Israelis and Palestinians, then I might be inclined to agree. Now, the above quote was by no means the only condescending and misleading one to be found in the interview, but given the recent report released by the French parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee asserting Israel’s “apartheid” water management policies, it stood out as particularly cringe-worthy. (Note: a partial English translation of the report can be found here, and the original report, in French, can be downloaded here in PDF format.)

The Problem with Campus Watch

campusWatch_03122012

During my final year as an undergraduate student in Canada, I took a class taught by a professor whose monograph–which was required reading–argued that conflict, partisanship, and oppression in the Middle East were fundamentally attributed to tribalism. One lecture focused on honor killings as distinct from, and worse than, other kinds of domestic homicide because they were symptomatic of a violent (Arab/Islamic) culture. At another point in the semester, the professor suggested that Arab states should be thankful that they are in such close proximity to a democracy like Israel. It was in the context of conducting research for this class that I discovered Campus Watch, a project associated with the Middle East Forum that provides critiques of the discipline of Middle East studies in North American universities. Campus Watch highlights five main problems plaguing the discipline today: “analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students.” Initially thinking that I had stumbled upon a project that sought to combat the kind of offensive and deeply essentialist views that were being espoused in this classroom, I soon realized that this professor might have been just the kind of academic that Campus Watch lauded.

Continue reading The Problem with Campus Watch

Israel and the Question of Apartheid

c889234799e865bbe90cee71f6cd2e53_MIsraeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is upon us again, and while Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine (C-SJP) sets up on College Walk, pro-Israeli organizations ranging from Hillel to LionPAC, and the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs are launching their responses to begin damage control.

IAW’s detractors are quick to argue that using the term “apartheid” in the context of Israeli occupation diminishes the suffering of South African victims of the Apartheid regime and exaggerates the current situation in Israel and Palestine. Time and again, pro-Palestinian groups, like C-SJP, are told that equating Israeli occupation with apartheid is a sensationalist, divisive tactic that, as Columbia Hillel’s Ariel Brinkman posits, represents a “perverse paradigm of prejudice against the Jewish state.” Continue reading Israel and the Question of Apartheid