Initiated by UCLA's Center for Near Eastern Studies and faculty from the Departments of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, and the School of Law, the conference will be co-hosted by the Middle East centers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.
The Naksa—the widely-used Arabic term for the “setback” suffered by Arabs in the 1967 war—represented not only a defeat but also a turning point. While this turning point had important political implications, its cultural ramifications and the explosion of creative expression it engendered also marked the Arab world indelibly. The proliferation of literary, critical, philosophical, artistic and journalistic output produced by Arab thinkers and artists in the aftermath of the Naksa will be the topic of a tri-campus conference to observe its 50th anniversary.
Initiated by UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies and faculty from the Departments of Comparative Literature, Anthropology, Near Eastern Languages & Cultures, and the School of Law, the conference will be co-hosted by the Middle East centers at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Barbara.
Separate panel discussions on all three campuses form the core of the conference. Videos of the panels will be made available on the conference website and the site of UCLA’s Center for Near Eastern Studies.
UC Berkeley’s panel of experts will reflect on how horizons of the future were differently produced across various disciplines after 1967. The Berkeley event will open with a keynote address by human rights attorney and activitist Noura Erakat, “Taking the Land without the People: International Law and the 1967 War.”
UCSB’s panel will consider how legality, legitimacy, and history have intersected over the last half century. It will be accompanied by an exhibition from the Palestine Poster Project Archive.
UCLA’s panel focuses on the cultural production of nostalgia and memory. Our panelists will be Hosam Aboul-Ela (University of Houston), Elliott Colla (Georgetown University), and Nadia Yaqub (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill).
The UCLA panel discussion, which is free to the public, will take place in the presentation room 11348 at Young Research Library on Friday, April 28, at 12 pm.
Click here to RSVP for the UCLA session.
Click here to visit the tri-campus website.