PSU Professor of history Jon Mandaville will speak on Palestinian arts and the difficulty of creating a national culture in a time of statelessness at 7:30 p.m. today in Smith Memorial Student Union, Room 338.
Mandaville’s lecture evening is part of an ongoing series of forums co-sponsored by local organization Palestine Lebanon Emergency Action (PLEA) and PSU’s Middle East Studies Center. He will be speaking on the theme “Palestine: History and Culture.”
“I’m going to talk about Palestinian culture–art, music, [and] film,” Mandaville said, “but in the context of the challenge of identity when you’re stateless.”
Mandaville teaches classes on Iraq, Palestine/Israel and the Ottoman Empire, and his writings include the book History of the Arabian Peninsula.
Previous speakers in the PLEA-Middle East Studies Center forums have included Mercy Corps’ Landrum Bolling, who showed a film he had shot interviewing ordinary Israelis and Palestinians about their hopes for the future; the University of Arizona’s Charles D. Smith, discussing ideas and misconceptions about Israel and Palestine; and professors John Damis and Aomar Boum, who spoke about Hezbollah.
PLEA and the Middle East Studies Center designed this series of forums in the hopes of providing Portlanders with a context to consider current events in the Middle East. Mandaville’s lecture is the fourth in a series of 12.
PLEA was founded by local activists Peter Miller, Lee Knightly, Rima Ghandour, Samar El Khoury and Hala Gores.