Stories from under Occupation: Performing the Palestinian Experience
A plethora of research has been done on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict; however, few have ventured to investigate and theorize its subjects or the articulation of Palestinian culture. Theatre and drama in the Arab world are under-researched, and when cultural production is studied, Palestinian theatre is nowhere mentioned. The history of Palestinian theatre dates back to 1850 when it was in tune with the neighboring cultural centers of the Arab world, i.e. Beirut and Cairo. Occupation since 1967 has had a great impact on Palestinian theatre, which has become a vehicle for asserting Palestinian identity and collective memory in the face of cultural annihilation. Through the use of al-Hakawati (the traditional storyteller) combined with narratives of memories, current theatre aims to portray life in turmoil caused by the political situation and the frustrations of the peace process with Israel.
Popular culture, relational history, and the question of power in Palestine and Israel
The marginalization of popular culture in radical scholarship on Palestine and Israel is symptomatic of the conceptual limits that still define much Middle East studies scholarship: namely, the prevailing logic of the nation-state on the one hand and the analytic tools of classical Marxist historiography and political economy on the other. This essay offers a polemic about the form that alternative scholarly projects might take through recourse to questions of popular culture. The authors argue that close attention to the ways that popular culture ““articulates”” with broader political, social, and economic processes can expand scholarly understandings of the terrain of power in Palestine and Israel, and hence the possible arenas and modalities of struggle.
How to do a p-descent on an elliptic curve
In this paper, we describe an algorithm that reduces the computation of the (full) p-Selmer group of an elliptic curve E over a number field to standard number field computations such as determining the (p-torsion of) the S-class group and a basis of the S-units modulo pth powers for a suitable set S of primes. In particular, we give a result reducing this set S of 'bad primes' to a very small set, which in many cases only contains the primes above p. As of today, this provides a feasible algorithm for performing a full 3-descent on an elliptic curve over Q, but the range of our algorithm will certainly be enlarged by future improvements in computational algebraic number theory. When the Galois module structure of E[p] is favorable, simplifications are possible and p-descents for larger p are accessible even today. To demonstrate how the method works, several worked examples are included.