Nadeem Karkabi is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Haifa, who studies Palestinian performative culture, and the interrelations between language, race, religion, and nationalism among Mizrahi Jews who perform Arabic music in Israel. In this episode, Aamer Ibraheem invites Karkabi to reflect on his relations to the anthropological field as an ethnographer who spent many years traveling between 48 Palestine, the West Bank, Amman, Berlin, London, and elsewhere in the world researching the alternative Palestinian music scene and the ways it helped forge different modes of solidarity and national belonging. They also discussed the significance of Palestinian cultural production, its aesthetics, and the different relations this production has to national and cosmopolitan features. Karkabi shares key insights from his current project on the working of culture and politics in the demarcation of the boundaries of Jewish collective in Israel and the way they challenge official state laws that safeguard its privileges. As a lecturer supervising university students, Karkabi spoke to us about the current trends and questions being invoked and unpacked by Palestinian students in the field of anthropology.

References:

Karkabi, Nadeem. 2016. Neither Heroes Nor Victims: Politics of Pleasure, Ethics of Resistance and Defiant-playful Subjectivities in the Palestinian Alternative Music Scene in Israel and the West Bank. [PhD Dissertation]. University of London, School of Oriental and African Studies.

--------------- . 2018. Electro Dabke: Performing Cosmopolitan-Nationalism and Borderless Humanity. Public Culture, 30(1), pp. 173-196.

--------------- . 2018. How and Why Haifa Has Become the “Palestinian Cultural Capital” in Israel. City & Community, 17(4), pp. 1168-1188.

--------------- . 2019. Arabic Language among Jews in Israel and the New Mizrahi Zionism: Between Active Knowledge and Performance. Journal of Levantine Studies, Vol. 9 No. 2, pp. 81-106.

--------------- . 2020. Self-Liberated Citizens: Unproductive Pleasures, Loss of Self, and Playful Subjectivities in Palestinian Raves. Anthropological Quarterly, pp. 679-708.

--------------- . 2021. The Impossible Quest of Nasreen Qadri to Claim Colonial Privilege in Israel. Ethnic and Racial Studies, pp. 1-21.

Photo Courtesy: https://www.matatu.co/routes/47soul

Music:

Oya Marhaba, by TootArd

Al Shatea’, Rah Nibni Madeeneh (We Shall Build a City)

47Soul, Moved Around

Neta Elkayam, Muhal Nensah