The lunchtime series will be held during term time on Mondays from 12.45 pm on uneven weeks at the Middle East Centre’s main reading room. Attendance is open to all students, researchers and academics, and we are keen to have as many DPhil students involved in this initiative. This is a brown bag, please feel free to bring along your lunch.

Monday 25th November 2013

Programme

Yoni Furas, St Antony’s College
In Need of a New Story, Writing, Teaching and Learning History in Mandate Palestine

For over a century Palestine’s past serves as an overly excavated archaeological site where the debate over the rightful owner of the ‘kushan of the past’, is continuously used as a charter reference for current policy. The teaching of history in the schools of both the Arab and Jewish communities played and is still playing a fundamental role in the transformation of this debate to an educational rational, turning the chaotic past into a linear national narrative. Focusing on the mandate period, my research seeks to trace, elucidate and interpret the grassroots of this national-educational self-portrait.

Edward McAllister, St Antony’s College,
Algeria’s Belle Epoque: memories of nation-building in the 1970s

This research explores the ways in which contemporary subjectivities in Algeria are articulated through socially held perceptions of the recent past, specifically during the much under-researched period of nation-building in the 1970s. This period represents the longest period of stability since independence and was characterised by authoritarian state-led development and considerable regime legitimacy. The paper will posit that the emancipatory promises made by postcolonial nationalism in Algeria during the 1970s are just as important as the decolonisation struggle in understanding shifting constructions of national consciousness. In addition, the paper will unpick how this period is viewed through the turbulent identity politics of the 1980s, the violence of the 1990s and the neoliberal economics and reinforced state power of the 2000s, as well as through generational change.