EVENT POSTPONED!! New Date TBD

Where next for Palestine’s heritage and cultural scene? In this talk I will combine several strands of my research on these topics extending them into a consideration of future scenarios and potentialities. I will begin with the current moment: the utter destruction of Gaza’s heritage in the context of genocide. I compare it with other forms of destruction that have targeted Palestinian heritage and culture, exploring their relation to different types and moments of colonialism. Palestinians have responded to these threats of cultural and material erasure by self-organizing into networks of grassroots institutions taking care of culture and the built environment in resourceful, imaginative ways. I have argued that such creative institutionalism has fostered positive change and enabled societal resilience. I have also suggested that Palestine may serve as a model for cultural self-organizing elsewhere and for reimagining more just institutions by civil societies in contexts of state oppression and failure. In light of recent developments, does this idea still hold and how?

Chiara De Cesari is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Trained in socio-cultural anthropology, Chiara is an internationally significant voice in debates over the geopolitical trajectories of contemporary culture. Her wide-ranging research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under conditions of post- and decoloniality, globalization and state transformation. In particular, it concerns the ways in which colonial legacies live on today, especially in cultural institutions and museums, and how artists and activists are contesting, claiming and reinventing these institutions. Against that backdrop, Chiara’s work shows how countercultures, arts practices, and decolonial struggles can drive change within public institutions and cultural discourses especially around heritage and identity. She is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), and co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014; European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in many international research projects, including leading now a major Dutch Research Council-funded project, named “Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation”. 

Sponsors: Hosted by the Mario Einaudi Center for International Studies and its Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) initiative, with support from Near Eastern Studies and Cornell Institute of Archaeology & Material Sciences. 

Event is both in person and virtual.