Ar ticle THE PERILS OF BELONGING AND COSMOP OLITAN OPTIMISM: AN AFFECTIVE READING OF THE ISRAELI/PALESTINIAN CONFLICT

Abstract This paper examines the psychic topography of identities of belonging for their sustainability in a plural world. By drawing on Freud's Moses and Monotheism, I will think about how collective identities are symbolic reconstructions of traumatic pasts and therefore foreclose their hybrid or cosmopolitan origins. While such insight demands a politic of generosity that considers the psychic ''necessities'' of stable racial identities, it also demands that we be aware of how the psychic mechanisms of survival, and the narratives and the ontologies they produce, might no longer serve their communities, or the communities with which they come into contact, well. Dissatisfied with Edward Said's postmodern/postcolonial response to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Freud and the Non-European, this paper offers a viewpoint that imagines political responses from the affective site of human loss and injury

Special Works School : Bambitchell and Richy Carey in conversation with Dina Georgis

"Special Works School transforms Gallery TPW into the speculative workshop of a surveillance artist. Throughout the gallery, objects and experiments stage the problems and possibilities of camouflage, and the accompanying video delves into its multi-sensory potential through an operatic, polyphonic exchange. Through this new body of work, Bambitchell asks: what is the sound, feel, and smell of surveillance? What does an aesthetic approach to surveillance render visible or, indeed, invisible? Framing surveillance as an aesthetic practice, Special Works School hones in on its psychic, material, and embodied dimensions, working from the positions of both surveillor and surveilled." -- Publisher's website

...East of Here... (Re)Imagining the "Orient"

Salloum provides a general context for "...East of Here..." by examining the political and cultural relations between the Middle East and the West. Bringing together works by artists from diverse backgrounds creates a multi-layered exhibition concerned with issues of cultural identity, postcolonialism, and neocolonialism. Kawaja's paper focuses on how representations of "Arab" women affect women's rights activists in the Middle East and North America. Marks questions the stereotypical representations of the "Orient" produced in the West. Hassan's analysis of the relationship between cultural production and economics focuses on questions concerning ideology, authoritarianism, and neo-orientalism. Artist's projects by Vogwill and Thorne. Brief descriptions of videotapes, films, and installations. Biographical notes. 54 bibl. ref