Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas SFSU Job Talks: 3/27 - 3/29

Dena Al-Adeeb

The Architecture of War: the U.S. Destruction of Iraq, Petro-cultural Engineering, and Reconfiguration of Arab and Muslim Imaginaries

• Monday, March 27
• 2 – 3:30 p.m.
• EP 116

Situated within the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, Al-Adeeb argues that the United States' systematic destruction of Iraq is part of a petro-cultural engineering project, one that extend U.S. hegemony in the Middle East region by way of militarization and neoliberal (re)construction. Al-Adeeb defines petro-culture engineering as the dialectical reinforcement of oil dependence, such as museums, that refashion social imaginaries following discourses and knowledge practices elaborated within these institutions. In this talk, Al-Adeeb exposes the effects and interconnectedness between the U.S. invasion of Iraq, militarism and neoliberal reconstruction as they relate to the reconfiguration of Arab and Muslim ethnicities and diasporas.

Farid Hafez

Fear of a Muslim Planet: Understanding Islamophobia in Europe

• Tuesday, March 28
• 2 – 3:30 p.m.
• EP 116

In this talk, Farid Hafez uses a decolonial reading of Islamophobia and discusses anti-Muslim racism as a manifestation of the will and desires to reproduce and defend a racial hierarchy of modern, colonial, white dominance. He focuses on how dominant systems of oppression criminalize Muslim agency to exclude the latter from participating in shaping the future of European societies. Relating the colonial past of European empires to the present, Farid Hafez pains a picture of how contemporary policies in several European nation-states continue and reconfigure attempts to control Muslim subjects as a racialized essential threat.

Omar Zahzah

Undercover and Hyper-Visible: Security Poetics and Pacification Prosaics in Black and Arab-American Literature

• Wednesday, March 29
• 2 – 3:30 p.m.
• EP 116

Over the past two decades, critical strands in political science and international studies have supplanted the "counter-insurgency" framework with a focus on "pacification." As the work of securitized subjects, Zahzah argues that Black and Arab-American literature offers an important site for viewing the impacts of and creative resistance to racialized state security initiatives. Zahzah believes that literacy representations of global joint struggle to converging projects of state-sanctioned racism and repression in Black and Arab-American literature constitute examples of what Zahzah is terming "security poetics:" a liberationist poetics defined through the rejection of hegemonic logics of "security" qua pacification.