Himmat Zoubi (EUME Fellow 2018-21) talk on “ “Columbus in Ha(y)ifa”—Destruction, Erasure, Re-placement and the Making of the Israeli Mixed City” was held in the framework of the virtual EUME Berliner Seminar on 8 July 2020. The talk was chaired by Diana Abbani (EUME Fellow 2018-20).

The 1948 Nakba and establishing the state of Israel did not mark neither the end of the erasure of Palestinian space, nor it marked the completion of the Zionist project. This talk will discuss spatial transformation in the city of Haifa during the first years following the Nakba. It will focus on the destruction of Haifa Al-Jadida (New Haifa) during the “Shikmona operation” and the erasure of street Arabic names in the city. It will argue that destruction, erasure and replacement were key elements in the making of the Israeli mixed cities.

Himmat Zoubi:  “Columbus in Ha(y)ifa”— the Making of the Israeli Mixed City

In the first decade of his reign, Vladimir Putin de-emphasized ideology to consolidate control and reinstate legitimacy of state power. The 2011 protests led him to shift gears and assume an ideological approach to consolidating legitimacy. This approach, however, led to the empowerment of “ideological entrepreneurs,” some of whom the Kremlin views as a liability. Who are the ideological entrepreneurs and how does the Kremlin manage them? What are the components of the Kremlin’s ideological operation and how does it impact ordinary Russians? Maria Lipman addressed these questions in her talk.

Speaker:
Maria Lipman - Editor, Point & Counterpoint

02/05/2019 - The Kremlin and Its Ideological Toolbox

"A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories" by Oleksandr Zabirko in the framework of the Prisma Ukraïna workshop "When the Muses are not silent: Intellectuals’ and Artists’ Responses to the Ukraine-Russia Conflict and post-Maidan Developments in Ukraine" in Berlin on 19 June, 2018

As one of the most popular types of speculative fiction, the “alternative” or “counterfactual histories” constitute a literary genre, in which one or more historical events occur differently than in the historical record. While in the Western fiction the literary models of time travel and counterfactual history function as the elements of the unreal “secondary world” and thus construct a distance between the fantastic and the mundane, contemporary Russophone  authors exploit the generic conventions of fantasy or science fiction in order to suggest a continuity between fiction and reality. Being omnipresent in various media, this aestheticized, counterfactual reality captivates its consumers and is arguably capable of substituting the real world, thus making it possible to read and interpret current geopolitical conflicts (like the war in Donbas) through the prism of speculative fiction. Focusing on geopolitical and social modeling in post-Soviet speculative fiction, the paper claims that the images of the Other, the archaic communal structures and the transformations of historical time provide here an aesthetic ground for a large patriotic consensus of a community united by common resentment.

O. Zabirko: A War for the Better Past: Political Visions in Post-Soviet Counterfactual Histories

The Berlin-based Forum Transregionale Studien is a platform that promotes the internationalization of research in the humanities and social sciences. It is dedicated to a research agenda that systematically links disciplinary approaches and the expertise of area studies by focusing on entanglements and interactions across national, cultural or regional borders. The Forum invites scholars from all over the world for fellowships and develops transregional communication formats.

The Forum provides scope for collaboration among researchers with different regional and disciplinary perspectives and appoints researchers from all over the world as Fellows. In cooperation with universities and research institutions in and outside of Berlin, it carries out research projects that examine other regions of the world and their relationship to Germany and Europe systematically and with new questions.

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Himmat Zoubi: “Columbus in Ha(y)ifa”— the Making of the Israeli Mixed City

Forum Transregionale Studien

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