Middle Eastern Studies Presents
Wednesday, November 12, 2025
Chronic Erasure: Reflection on Archive, Curation, and Storage in Palestine under Israeli Settler Colonialism
Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema
6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Mazen Iwaisi, Ibrahim Abu Lughod fellow, Columbia University
Mazen Iwaisi's research examines how Israeli settler colonialism operates through archaeological archival practices to disrupt Palestinian presence and state-building processes. Employing institutional ethnography and archival analysis, he investigates how archives become sites of contestation between colonial erasure and Palestinian institutional development. Israeli settler colonialism undermines Palestinian heritage institutions through "chronic erasure"—manipulating temporal frameworks that destroy present Palestinian connections whilst fabricating alternative Israeli narratives. Palestinian state-building efforts resist these processes through institutional archaeology, creating archives that assert sovereignty and cultural continuity despite occupation.
Cases from Gaza's emergency artefact preservation and West Bank excavations reveal how Palestinian archival practices embody resistance, establishing knowledge infrastructures whilst confronting colonial dispossession. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities exemplifies this tension, navigating resource constraints and political limitations whilst building institutional capacity for heritage preservation. This demonstrates how Palestinian archival work transcends documentation, functioning as state-building acts that assert Palestinian historical presence while constructing institutional frameworks for cultural preservation and national continuity. These practices counter settler colonial temporality by maintaining Palestinian cultural memory against systematic erasure.
Cases from Gaza's emergency artefact preservation and West Bank excavations reveal how Palestinian archival practices embody resistance, establishing knowledge infrastructures whilst confronting colonial dispossession. The Palestinian Department of Antiquities exemplifies this tension, navigating resource constraints and political limitations whilst building institutional capacity for heritage preservation. This demonstrates how Palestinian archival work transcends documentation, functioning as state-building acts that assert Palestinian historical presence while constructing institutional frameworks for cultural preservation and national continuity. These practices counter settler colonial temporality by maintaining Palestinian cultural memory against systematic erasure.
This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Curatorial Studies, the Human Rights Project and the Anthropology program.
Mazen Iwaisi is currently the Ibrahim Abu Lughod fellow at Columbia University where he is working on his first book, Archive, Curation and Storage in Palestine, which examines the hidden history of archive, curation and storage in the aftermath of the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. He earned his PhD from Queen's University Belfast, examining the concept of archaeopolitics in the making of the Palestinian National Spatial Plan, with funding from the Palestinian American Research Centre and Corrymeela Community in Northern Ireland. Mazen is currently working with Brian Boyd, Jamal Barghouth, and other scholars on the Archaeology of the Nakba project, "From Memory to Place."
For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].
Time: 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema
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