The Native and the Refugee
With speaker Sara Scalenghe
Associate Professor, History
Loyola University, Maryland
Author of Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500-1800 (2014)
Thursday October 29
Time: 7:00pm
Location: World Room, 3rd Floor Pulitzer Hall, Journalism School
2950 Broadway at 116th Street
The Center for Palestine Studies is proud to present an evening with
The Native and the Refugee project, as part of its new film series, Palestine Cuts. Filmmakers and producers
Matt Peterson and
Malek Rasamny present an original and powerful multi-media project that brings together the spaces of the Indian reservation and Palestinian refugee camp, from Pine Ridge and Akwesane to Ain al-Hilweh and Aida. Using archival material, short-films and interviews, the project explores the centralit
y of these spaces for Native and Palestinian struggles in ways that illuminate how people organize politically around questions of land and territory in relation to communal conceptions of autonomy.
Moderated by Frances Negron-Muntaner, filmmaker and Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Director, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, Columbia University.
With special guests, Audra Simpson, Associate Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University and Nidal Bitari, founder of the Palestinian Association of Human Rights in Syria.
Director/Producer, Matt Peterson's films and videos have screened at Anthology Film Archives, Eyebeam, the Film Society of Lincoln Center, International House Philadelphia, Millennium Film Workshop, MoMA PS1, and at scattered microcinemas and universities across North America and Europe. In 2014 he completed feature film on the Tunisian insurrection, Scenes from a Revolt Sustained, with a production grant from the Doha Film Institute. His writings on film have appeared in the Brooklyn Rail, Death+Taxes, Evergreen Review, Idiom, The L, and New York Press. He co-edited, with Barney Rosset & Ed Halter, From the Third Eye: The Evergreen Review Film Reader (Seven Stories Press, 2016). He was a member of the collectives Red Channels and the 16 Beaver Group, and is currently part of a commune in New York called Woodbine.
Director/Producer, Malek Rasamny is a researcher and artist based in both New York and Beirut. He has worked at the Maysles Documentary Center in Harlem, New York, and was a founding member of the Red Channels film collective, the Ground Floor Collective, and the LERFE space in Harlem, where he collaborated with New York based artists at the intersection of urban youth culture, transnational activism, and collective experimentation. His writings on film have been featured in the Daily Star, the largest English language daily newspaper in the Middle East, and he was interviewed by the Canadian arts magazine FUSE about his work in Red Channels.
Dr.Frances Negron-Muntaner is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, curator, and scholar. Her career spans multiple disciplines and practices; including cinema, literature, cultural criticism, and politics.
Dr. Audra Simpson, whose latest book is the acclaimed Mohawk Interruptus: Political Life Across the Borders of Settler States was published by Duke Uiversity Press in 2014. Simpson presented the Keynote address at the 7th International Conference of Critical Geography in Ramallah, Palestine in July 2015.
Nidal Bitari is from the Palestinian refugee camp Yarmouk, the largest of all Palestinian refugee camps, outside Damascus. He earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in political sociology from Damascus University, but was forced to leave in the midst of the Syrian Civil War and the ensuing siege of Yarmouk. He is the founder of the Palestinian Association of Human Right in Syria,
Sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies and Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race.