SOPHIA AZEB /// The “No-State Solution”: Power of Imagination for the Palestinian Struggle

This conversation with Sophia Azeb is the first of a series recorded along the American and Canadian West Coast. Sophia and I talk about our frustrations to see the lack of imagination offered by the “solutions” (a highly problematic term) often given to end what remains problematic to call “the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.” In opposition to the traditional “two-state solution” and “one-state solution,” Sophia proposes a “no-state solution,” that refuses the recognition of any property on the land and thus, state-sovereignty. We talk about the land being practiced by the bodies, and the bodies being fragments of the land, through a corpus of anti-colonial poetry. Finally we address science-fiction as a provider of narratives whose imaginative power can have important political impact in the construction of a collective future.

Sophia Azeb is a PhD Candidate in the Department of American Studies & Ethnicity at the University of Southern California. Her dissertation project, Ceci (n’)est (pas) une Arabe: Cultural Explorations of Blackness in the North African Diaspora, 1952-1979, explores articulations of blackness within multilingual and transnational anti-colonial cultural practices of expatriate African Americans, Algerians, and Egyptians during the Cold War era. She writes on these and related topics for Africa Is A Country, The Feminist Wire, and KCET Artbound. Sophia is an ardent Gooner, and can be found on Twitter: @brownisthecolor.

WEBSITES:

– http://africasacountry.com/author/smallsilence/
– http://thefeministwire.com/2012/09/introducing-sophia-azeb/
– http://www.kcet.org/arts/artbound/columnists/sophia-azeb/

REFERENCE BOOKS:

– Mahmoud Darwish, “Ana Atin ila Zit ‘aynaki (I am coming to the shadows of your eyes).”
– Mike Krebs and Dana M. Olwan. “‘From Jerusalem to the Grand River, Our Struggles are One’: Challenging Canadian and Israeli Settler Color Colonial Studies 2:2, 2012.
– Achille Mbembe. De La Postcolonie, essai sur l’imagination politique dans l’Afrique contemporaine. Éditions Karthala, 2000.
– Joe Sacco. Palestine. Fantagraphics, 2001.
– Raja Shehadeh, Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape, Scribner, 2008.
– Raja Shehadeh, 2037: Le Grand Bouleversement, Galaade, 2011.

REFERENCE ART WORK:

– Larissa Sansour, “Nation Estate” (2012):

– Larissa Sansour, “A Space Exodus” (2009):

REFERENCE PHOTOGRAPHS:

– Israeli settlement of Kochav Ya’akov near Qalandiya checkpoint (West Bank) /// Photograph by

– Palestinian “settlement” in the North of Ramallah on the road to Birzeit University  /// Photograph by