From Tahrir Square to Zuccotti Park: The Arab Spring and the De-Centering of American Studies
The Doha Institute for Graduate Studies with support from the Qatar National Research Fund
January 8-11
MONDAY, JANUARY 8
1-3 PM: Conference Organizers Welcoming Remarks and Introduction
Eid Mohamed and Melani McAlister
QNRF CWSP and DI Research Office Director Opening Remarks
Abdellahi Hussein, Program Manager, SAH, QNRF Technical
Raed Habayeb, Director of Research and Grants Department
Opening Remarks:
Yasir Suleiman Malley, DI Acting President
Kandice Chuh, American Studies Association President
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Humanities
Reuben E. Brigety II, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, GWU
Keynote Speech:
The Omnipresence of America and the Absence of American Studies
Azmi Bishara, Chair of the Board of Trustees of DI
3:30-5:30: Frameworks in Transnational American Studies
Chair: Firat Oruc, Georgetown University in Qatar
The Transnational Notes of Afro-Arab Jazz
Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico, USA
Provincializing America and the Making of the Twentieth Century Global Human Rights Imagination
Mark Bradley, University of Chicago, USA
The Fate of Regionalism in North America in the Trump Era: Obstinate or Obsolete?
Gustavo Vega-Cánovas, Colegio de México, México
American Studies Away from Home: Indigeneity’s Challenges and Provocations
Robert Warrior, University of Kansas, USA
TUESDAY, JANUARY 9
9:00-11:00: Political Imaginaries: The Questions of Orientalism
Chair: Elizabeth Kassab
America, Orientalism, and/in “the Asian Century”
Kandice Chu, City University of New York, USA
Transnational Histories of American Islamophobia: The Local and the Global
Karine Walther, Georgetown University Qatar, Qatar
Beyond National Borders: American Travel Writing on the Mediterranean
Karim Bejjit, Abdelmalek Essaâdi University, Morocco
The Arabs and the United States: Perceptions and Assessments
Israa Batayneh, Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, Qatar
11:15-1:15: Borders and Beyond: The Spatial Imagination of American Studies
Chair: Ayman El-Desouky
The Politics of Scale: Space and Notions of Threat in the Relation Between America and the World
Marco Mariano, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
Tahrir Square vs Zuccotti Park: When “the genie is out of the bottle”
Eid Mohamed, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
Immigration, Ethnicity, and Welfare States: Transnational Social Politics in the U.S. between the Wars
Axel Schäfer, Johannes Gutenberg University, Germany
Safe from Hate
Christina Hanhardt, University of Maryland, USA
1:30-2:30: Lunch
2:45-4:45: Whence and Wherefore US Power
Chair: Abdullah Al-Arian, Georgetown University Qatar, Qatar
The (Im)possibility of American Studies after Trump: Projecting the Idea of America in an Era of Populism
Abdelwahab El-Affendi, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
Militainment: The Art of Killing Yemenis in the War on Terror Era
Waleed Mahdi, University of Oklahoma, USA
Neoliberalism and the Transnational Re/production of “Threats”
Deepa Kumar, Rutgers University, USA
The Mall as Museum
Iman Hamam, Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 10
9:00-11:00: “Yours in Struggle”: Minoritization and the Politics of Knowledge
Chair: Nijmeh Hajjar
Real Time with Bill Maher and the Good Muslims of Liberal Multiculturalism
Evelyn Alsultany, University of Michigan, USA
The Open Question of Race: Non-Sovereign Scripts and Messy Racial
Subjectivities in Contemporary Puerto Rico
Isar Godreau, University of Puerto Rico - Cayey, Puerto Rico
Outside Trauma: Paul Beatty’s The Sell-Out and “Unmitigated Blackness”
Amy Nestor, Georgetown University Qatar, Qatar
Black Studies: After Revolution, Before Freedom
Jafari Allen, University of Miami
11:15-1:15: Against Exceptionalism: Decentering and Displacing
Chair: Dana Olwan
“Settler Colonialism and the Politics of Occupy Wall Street:
Indigeneity and the 'Other' 1%”
J. Kehaulani Kauanui, Wesleyan University, USA
What Happened?: A European Perspective on the Trump Presidency
Liam Kennedy, University College Dublin, Ireland
Homonationalism in American Studies: Rethinking Queer Theory and Permanent War
Jasbir Puar, Rutgers University, USA
Before I Came to America, America Came to Me
Hamid Dabashi, Columbia University, USA
1:30-2:30: Lunch
2:45-5: Teaching with Tension: Teaching the US beyond its borders
This panel will address the extent to which attitudes about the US, impacted by our current political environment, have produced pedagogical challenges for professors in the humanities and social sciences who teach subjects that involve the US. This panel brings together scholars who direct centers and/or teach American Studies outside the US to discuss the special challenges with teaching, funding, curriculum, and research.
Panel Moderators: Melani McAlister and Eid Mohamed
Reuben E. Brigety II, Dean of the Elliott School of International Affairs, GWU
Axel Schäfer, Director of the Obama Institute, Johannes Gutenberg Univ. Germany
Liam Kennedy, Director of the Clinton Institute, University College
Alex Lubin, former director, Center for American Studies and Research, American University of Beirut
Marco Mariano, Università degli Studi del Piemonte Orientale, Italy
THURSDAY, JANUARY 11
9:00-11:00: Roundtable Discussion: American Studies in the Arab World
American Studies as a field will help us prepare our students for citizenship in a world in which borders are more permeable, cross-cultural encounters more prevalent and nations increasingly interconnected. It is imperative to open a productive dialogue among the world’s nations if we are to foster peace, security and prosperity. In this spirit, American Studies has a significant role to play in deepening intercultural and interfaith understanding, and a pivotal intellectual leadership role to play for both Arabs and the world. It is critical that Arab universities create the institutional capacity to bring faculty together in a sustained, integrated, and multi-directional intellectual home dedicated to the study of America in a global frame.
Chairs: Eid Mohamed and Melani McAlister
Is American Studies Viable in Today’s Middle East?
John Hillis, Founding Director, American Studies Center, University of Bahrain
Lessons from the Study of Muslims in the United States for American Studies in Arab Countries
Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, Reed College, USA
Introducing Institutionalized Uncertainty: Teaching US Senate Races in the International Classroom
Jocelyn Sage Mitchell, Northwestern University in Qatar, Qatar
Karim Bejjit
Kandice Chuh
Alex Lubin
Waleed Mahdi
Karine Walther