Soon I’m off to Chicago for the Dialogue Under Occupation conference. How exciting! But what’s scaring me the most is that it’s 3°C there right now. Ouch. Anyway, here’s the abstract of what I’ll be presenting:
‘The Earth is Closing in On Us’: models of everyday and extraordinary political worlds in weblogs from Palestine and Iraq
We went to sleep to the rattling of our windows and invasive pounding and after-echo of the shells. We sleep as they fall. We pray fajir, and they fall again. We wake, and they are still falling. When they are closer, when they fall in Shija’iya east of Gaza City, they make my stomach drop. And I want to hide, but I don’t know where.
The Earth is Closing in on Us.
So writes Laila El-Haddad, a prominent Palestinian blogger living in Gaza. In this paper, I explore how weblogs’ intimate and often mundane inscriptions of everyday life can contribute to a mobile and transgressively “invocationary” kind of political discourse, especially when placed in the context of occupied, contested or traumatic territories. Its registers invoke everything from geopolitical commentary to the interstitially micropolitical experiences of occupation and contestation — plus the unlikely disjunctures that can interrupt both. In Baghdad, young girl publishes a constant stream of photographs of cute kittens, occasionally interspersed with reports of bombs exploding down the road. Another Iraqi blogger deals with annoying electricity problems and the terror of raids on her house by the US military. Back in Gaza, Laila El-Haddad’s blog revolves around the experience of raising her young son Yousuf, documenting how the Israel’s occupation and continuing military incursions into Gaza seep into the most intimate or seemingly trivial aspects of life, from changing nappies to buying bread and spices, or getting her son to sleep.
In this lived/media context, the divisions between macropolitics and that which has been relegated to the domestic sphere begin to totter and decompose, suggesting a traumatic political subjectivity that is topologically uncertain, in an ambivalently productive way. The blogging of “geopolitical trauma” can also be read as fundamentally concerned with space, from bloggers’ routine descriptions of endless checkpoints and blockages, to their frequent allegorical modelling of “the world” as a figure that is revealed in moments of crisis — a figure with which an ethico-political relationship is demanded by circumstances. This paper explores, then, the ways in which this ethical relationship unfolds under occupation, and what possibilities it provides.
I’ll let you know you how it goes. My brother was born in Chicago, but I’ve never been, so it’ll be interesting to engage with that familial, prosthetic memory. My brother’s a freak — he started speaking in sentences when he was 12 months old. And apparently he used to greet the janitor at their apartment block with “hi, man”. Incidentally: you know, it’s good having people in your family that just get where you’re coming from. For example, for my birthday this month, my brother got me Fredric Jameson’s Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions.
