Please join the CMES for a talk by Malek Rasamny, a researcher, writer, filmmaker and programmer based in New York and Lebanon. Rasamny was a founding member of the Red Channels Film Collective and the LERFE space in Harlem, New York. He is the co-founder of The Native and the Refugee along with his collaborator Matt Peterson.
The Native and the Refugee is a multi-media film and research project that compares the Palestinian and Native American experience by examining the infrastructure, politics, and geography of American Indian reservations alongside Palestinian refugee camps. They have filmed in Palestinian refugee camps throughout Lebanon, Jordan and the West Bank, and have traveled and filmed across the United States in the historic Pine Ridge reservation of the Lakota in South Dakota, the Mohawk territory of Akwesasne between New York and Canada and the Navajo Nation in the American Southwest.
The project looks at Palestinian refugee camps and native reservations as spaces of exception within the prevailing nation-states they are located in--as repositories of very particular histories of displacement, and as locations where the logic of modern nationalism is thoroughly excavated, scrutinized and deconstructed.
