Wednesday, February 12, 2020 | 6:00 – 7:30 PM | A-5, Top Floor, Academic Block, LUMS
Imagination as Resistance
Adania Shibli
How do the tactics of “playing” and “cunningness” manifest themselves privately and publicly as tenable measures for challenging political oppression and countering tyranny, exploitation, and deep inequality? Playing and cunningness are increasingly put into practice by Palestinians as means to guarantee their existence where it is undermined by the regulations of the Israeli settler state. Not least, playfulness and cunningness have found their way to the works of Palestinian visual artists, especially during the past two decades. In so doing, these artists establish imagination as one such possible terrain whereby the oppressed can envision tactics and methods to foil the greater reality of disavowal and expulsion being practiced by the Israeli state and occupation. The talk will showcase a variety of such art works, including the different aspects of oppression that inspire them--both in their form and/or their content--, and the uncanny methods of resistance they subsequently inspire.
Adania Shibli is a Palestinian writer who has been writing novels, plays, short stories and narrative essays, which were published in various anthologies, art books, and literary and cultural magazines in different languages. She has twice been awarded with the Qattan Young Writer’s Award—Palestine in 2001 for her novel Masaas, and in 2003 for her novel Kulluna Baíd bethat al Miqdar aan el-Hub. Her latest novel is Tafsil Thanawi. Amongst her non-fiction books are, the art book Dispositions, and an edited collection of essays entitled A Journey of Ideas Across: In Dialog with Edward Said. Along her writing, Shibli is engaged in academic research, and since 2013 she has been teaching part-time at the Department of Philosophy and Cultural Studies, Birzeit University Palestine.