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Walid El-Houri, Contribution to the panel 'Protest Politics', part of the Conference Weak Resistance , ICI Berlin, 27 May 2015, video recording, mp4, 18:09

Orientalism – and its images – are far from dead. Despite Edward Said's forceful critique of Orientalism as a regime of representation that dominates and structures an ambiguous 'East', its discourse persists. Representations, in the form of paintings, drawings, photography, films, and maps, have been powerful means by which the 'Middle East' has been pictured in the last two centuries, and, as such, have animated imperialist projects, fueled Orientalist and self-Orientalist fantasies, and upheld reductive and essentialized understandings of the region and its people. Since September 2001, Orientalist imagery has undergone a political and social intensification, which is now compounded by the 'refugee crisis.' This intensification has been made apparent in discourses that easily interchange the 'immigrant' for the 'refugee' and 'Muslim' in Europe and the US, but also in tropes of Arab, Muslim or Oriental otherness used by political actors in the region itself. This symposium examines the continued seductiveness that Orientalism seems to hold over the production of images of the contemporary 'Middle East', both inside and outside of the region. How are (self) Orientalized images and imaginaries translated into perceptions of authenticity and identity? How do such images figure into the policies and politics in the ongoing 'global war on terror'? How do modes of contemporary image-making engage with, resist, or respond to tropes of Orientalism in the current political moment? The symposium features a talk and parallel exhibit by Tintinologist Nadim Damluji on early-to-mid 20th century Arab comic strips, which examine the genealogy of Orientalist image-making from the cartoon to cartography in the present moment. Programme Thursday, 6 July 2017 11:00 Welcome and Introduction 11:30 – 13:30 Panel I: Mapping and Geographies of Heritage Moderator: Saima Akhtar, Yale University Geographies of Orientalism Mariam Banahi (Anthropologist, Johns Hopkins University) Syrian Heritage Archive Project (SHAP): Archives as a Basis ...

As a practice, failure recognizes that alternatives are embedded already in the dominant and that power is never total or consistent; indeed failure can exploit the unpredictability of ideology and its indeterminate qualities. J. J. Halberstam Revolutionaries are everywhere, but nowhere is there any real revolution. Abdelkebir el-Khatibi The word resistance usually evokes images of struggle, of opposition, but also of power, of domination, and oppression. In its concrete manifestations, however, resistance is more of a process of trial and error; it is often a story of failures intersecting, weaknesses combining and of building precarious solidarities in times of crisis. In this sense, revolution is never a simple story of 'success'. This one-day conference aimed at exploring resistances as a multiplicity, as practices and modes of thinking that challenge normative values of success and failure. Resistances act on the mechanisms of power in particular places, in concerted actions, as well as in daily routines of living, being, working, imagining, and organizing. They can manifest as coalitions of the weak and dispossessed but also as coagulations in that in-between, uncomfortable space of the semi-peripheral. The panels investigated resistances in the decolonial queer context, the cultural field at large, protest politics, and sex work, and involved researchers alongside activists and other agents. ; Weak Resistance: Everyday Struggles and the Politics of Failure , conference, ICI Berlin, 27 May 2015