School of Social and Political Science

Description

Title:   Theorizing Race in the Colonial Question of Palestine 

Abstract:

What is new and old about racism and racialization as analytics of critique against settler colonialism in Palestine? Given the persistence of racial violence in Palestine and against Palestinians across the past century, why has the analytic of ‘anti-Palestinian racism’ been a historically negated framework of critique? While there has been a burgeoning body of scholarship throughout the past two decades that have engaged race and racism as analytical registers to examine asymmetrical relations of power in Israel/Palestine, these interventions have at times heavily imported repertoires anchored in the Global North, obscuring the centrality and specificity of land in the on-going anti-colonial struggle for freedom in Palestine. Further, oftentimes, these works have delimited and flattened the category of race and the question of racial difference as a self-evident critique organized around identity claims (i.e. ethnicity and religion) rather than situating the analysis in a critique of colonial power. Approaching race as a constituent of such power rather than assumed and fixed identity marker allows us to think about the broader imperial and settler colonial forces that enabled the entanglement between the Jewish Question and the Question of Palestine, both of which come to undergo radical transformation in the late nineteenth and twentieth century through the territorial realization of modern political Zionism in Palestine. This lecture returns to some key canonical texts within Palestine Studies to think further about the entanglements between critiques of colonialism and racism circulating in the early decades following Israel’s state declaration. Reading contemporary critiques of anti-Palestinian racism through a revisitation of such intellectual legacies allows us to understand how we might approach the colonial question of Palestine as one indexed first and foremost by a story about race.