Join us for a conversation between author Liron Mor (Comparative Literature, UC Irvine), Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed (Comparative Literature), and Roni Masel (Comparative Literature) about Mor's new book, Conflicts: The Poetics and Politics of Palestine-Israel (Fordham University Press, 2024). This book queries what conflict means in the context of Palestine–Israel. Conflict has long been seen as singular and primary: as an “original sin” that necessitates the state and underwrites politics. This book problematizes this universal notion of conflict, revealing its colonial implications and proposing that conflicts are always politically constructed after the fact and are thus to be understood in their various specific forms. The book explores sites of poetic and political strife in Palestine–Israel by combining a comparative study of Hebrew and Arabic literature with political and literary theory. Mor leverages an archive that ranges from the 1930s to the present, from prose and poetry to film and television, to challenge the conception of the Palestinian–Israeli context as a conflict, delineating the colonial history of this concept and showing its inadequacy to Palestine–Israel. Instead, Mor articulates locally specific modes of theorizing the antagonisms and mediations, colonial technologies, and anticolonial practices that make up the fabric of this site. In so doing, Conflicts aims to generate a historically and geographically situated mode of theory-making, which defies the separation between the conceptual and the poetic.
Liron Mor is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of Critical Theory at the University of California, Irvine. Her research spans the fields of critical and political theory, Hebrew and Arabic literatures, translation and visual studies, and critiques of law, conflict, and colonialism. Mor is particularly interested in local conceptualization of colonial and racial processes as expressed in the cultures of Palestine-Israel. She is currently working on a second book project that examines intentionality as a rhetorical, political, and legal racialization mechanism by focusing on the colonial conditions experienced by both Palestinians and Mizrahi Jews.
Thursday, September 19 @ 5:00-6:30pm
3335 Dwinelle Hall, UC Berkeley campus
RSVP Here.
Co-sponsors: Berkeley Center for Jewish Studies; Center for Middle Eastern Studies