Desiring the Middle East at Pembroke
One of the regular lecture series at Pembroke is the ‘Desiring the Middle East’ series, organised by Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu.
The central concern of this bi-weekly seminar series is to offer unfamiliar ways of looking at the contemporary Middle and Near East, as an attempt to fix Eurocentric categorisation and understanding, and narrow the epistemological gap by informing Pembroke and Cambridge scholars and students about diverse aspects of everyday life in the region.
The Easter term timetable included discussions on democracy in Turkey, the politics of religious differences at the border, and the limits of ethnographic research methods in the aftermath of a catastrophe. The keynote speaker was Dr Ruba Salih of SOAS, who spoke on “Desiring rights beyond the state: The political life of displacement in the Middle East”.
Dr Salih’s talk was a fascinating exploration of the political lives of refugees living in camps in the West Bank. She described the tension between a desire for normalcy, and an absolute rejection of normalisation by displaced people living in the camps. Dr Salih described how the physical space of the camp became both a material signifier of a state of occupation, and an anchor for communal identity, representing a state of ‘permanent temporariness’. She argued that camps – despite not being thought of in scholarship as part of/producing political and cultural processes – are actually the site of an emerging political consciousness. They are dynamic political environments that are particularly complex in this context because their inhabitants are Palestinian refugees within Palestine – reminded of home but also exiled from it.
An earlier event in term involved a panel on activism and creativity, which was followed by screenings of short films banned from an LGBT film festival in Ankara, Turkey. Much as Dr Salih had done for Palestinian refugee camps, the films offered a way to engage with the nuances of life on the margins. Simply living with one’s true identity can be highly political when that identity is seen as immoral or inferior.
Thank you to Dr Sertaç Sehlikoglu for organising this lecture series, and to the speakers for sharing their knowledge and insight. The series will continue in the Michaelmas term. Follow the Facebook page for updates.