The Presidential Address by Dina Rizk Khoury and Awards Ceremony was held Wednesday, December 1 starting at 4:30pm EST.

 

Please see here for the video of the Presidential Address.

 

Please see here for the video of the Awards Ceremony.

Pessoptimism and the Discontents of the Field
Dina Rizk Khoury, Professor, George Washington University

Emile Habibi, Palestinian/Israeli award-winning author and politician recounts in his book, The Secret Life of Saeed: the Pessoptimist, the story of Saeed, an ordinary Palestinian attempting to navigate life in Israel between 1948 and 1967 as both informer for the Israeli state and victim of the politics of survival of Palestinians. Pessoptimism is Saeed’s existential condition, his mode of being in the world. It speaks to his desire to make meaning of his life under untenable historical conditions. It struck me, during summer months spent in Beirut, that Saeed’s pessoptimism is a particularly apt portrayal of lives lived day by day and hour by hour of an increasing number of citizens, protestors, refugees, displaced persons and migrants in the nations and regions we cover during the past twenty years or so. I would hazard to say as well, that despite the vast differences in our material and political circumstances, pessoptimism has increasingly animated our ability, particularly in fields of inquiry that cover the modern period, to write and teach the Middle East and North Africa. As a field of inquiry, the study of the MENA region is thriving despite the challenges of funding, limitations on the ability to conduct research, and the field’s entanglements with the foreign and domestic politics of the US. Yet, we often feel suspended between the elation and hope that we share with the people whose lives, protests, and creative reckonings inspire our intellectual engagements and the violence and loss that accompanies and often coexists with much of the politics. What are our responsibilities to our colleagues whose help and research we use to our professional advantage in a country deeply implicated in the violence against the people of the region? What are the strategies we can develop to continue teaching the Middle East during these years of structural transformation in the political economy of higher education that are compounded by systemic attempts by state legislatures in the US to undermine our ability to teach its modern history without erasures?
 

The Presidential Address and Awards Ceremony are open to the public. (Neither membership nor registration are required to attend.)

Members Meeting (Thursday, December 2)