Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies Research Seminar Series: Tasneem Yousef

About the event

What does it mean to speculate towards liberation? While the liberated future of Palestine is rarely articulated as a utopia, when we consider the force that pulls people towards futurity, that propels their dreams and imaginations, it is often utopian desire and longing that can be found in those spaces, even if it is not named as such and even if it does not resemble the common perception of utopia.

This talk is concerned with how utopianism is constructed within Palestinian speculative texts as much as what a utopian framework and affect allows the texts to do and achieve. In order to construct utopia as a speculative affect, the presentation will ponder utopia as space, utopia as future history, and utopia as potentiality.

The first section first examines the spatial history of utopia and the limitations of utopia’s spatiality, for if “there is a transformation of the topos [of utopia] from space into time” (Bloch 2), then what might it mean to imagine a future Palestine—whose struggle is so rooted in a specific land—as a space and a place? Utopia as future history posits historicization as a constitutive formal element of Palestinian utopian texts that responds to the obscuring of historical processes, and attempts to make the passage into futurity more legible and imaginable.

The third section, utopia as potentiality, builds on the previous sections to explore the tension between constructing utopia as an image of a possible better future, and utopia as a futurity that is always in flux and open to speculation.

Finally, all three sections culminate in a conclusion that attempts to articulate what a Palestinian utopian affective mode is, and what its response to the intensification of political and historical forces within and around Palestine can tell us about the road to the future, and what it demands of us.

About the seminar series

The IMES Research Seminar for this first semester of 2026/27 will showcase some of the latest research across the broad field of Islamic and Middle East Studies, both within the department and beyond, setting it within the context of IMES as it moves towards its 50th year.

How to attend

Events are free and everyone is welcome. No booking is required. If you wish to join online, you can email a colleague in IMES for joining information.

All talks are followed by a reception.

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