Danielle Haque, Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (New Texts Out Now)

Danielle Haque, Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (New Texts Out Now)

Danielle Haque, Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (New Texts Out Now)

By : Danielle Haque

Danielle Haque, Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press, Critical Arab American Series, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Danielle Haque (DH): I trace the origins of this book to a visit I made to Switzerland right before the Swiss voted yes on the referendum banning the construction of minarets. The right-wing Swiss People’s Party produced posters depicting a woman in a burqa against the background of the Swiss flag. Minarets in the shape of menacing missiles emerge from the Swiss flag like an infestation. The referendum and the propaganda supporting it did not surprise me, but I was surprised at the vocal media reaction in the United States that this was a violation of religious freedom. I was struck by how idealistic the US responses were about the expansiveness of religious freedom in the United States, despite the fact that it has policed religious minorities from its inception—from Native genocide, to colonial era anti-Catholic laws, to nineteenth-century massacres of Mormons. In the United States, we tout the value of religious freedom and secular governance, even in the face of blatant anti-Muslim discrimination, including the Patriot Act, NYPD (New York City Police Department) surveillance, and Guantanamo Bay. Anti-Muslim rhetoric masked by secular logics inform global politics from Quebec Bill 21, which bans public servants from wearing religious symbols, to French towns banning burkinis, to fourteen US states introducing anti-shari‘a bills in 2017 alone. 

At the time of my visit, I was contemplating my dissertation topic in my field of religion and literature, and in part because of the increase of these kinds of policies, my focus shifted to the question of how contemporary authors and artists engage with secularism. In the process of researching, I read scholars like the brilliant Tracy Fessenden, who demonstrates how canonical literature and its various genres naturalize what are Protestant values into civic ones. Beyond this historical work, much of the scholarship I found on secularism and literature is about postsecular literature that evidences a weakened, liberal, hybrid religion that could co-exist with secular modernity. But I was not interested in literature that makes claims of belonging based on assimilation or tolerance. I wanted to explore literature that instead bristled against the hypocrisies of Western secularism and exposed its workings. I focused on Islam because after September 11 and its ensuing conflicts, political debates around secularism are often framed around an alleged “clash” with Islam. By narrowing my analysis to Arab Anglophone writers and transnational Arab and Muslim artists, I was able to engage specific histories of racialization and surveillance of Arabs in Western nations, as well as explore transnational works that defy national boundaries and create solidarities.

Secularism is perceived as abstract—the absence of religion—but is in fact embodied and practised ...

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

DH: The book addresses the ways that secularism makes claims about the meaning of religion and what constitutes proper religious subjectivity in the modern world, and the ways these claims limit religious freedoms, embodiments, and practices.  Secularism is perceived as abstract—the absence of religion—but is in fact embodied and practised, and our cultural production reflects and shapes that practice. I argue that the authors and artists in the book refute contemporary politics that frame debates about secularism and modernity solely according to their supposed incommensurability with Islam. Secularism underwrites the story we tell about the evolution of Western, modern, democratic nation-states, and their colonial civilizing mission. The works in my book do not just critique the failures of secularism to deliver on its promises of freedom, but also give us models for alternative ways of thinking about what it means to be religious and secular, and how to live in community in ways that enable us to flourish together. 

I want to use this opportunity to highlight the authors and artists included in the book. My preface begins by framing the book’s argument through the poetry of Khaled Mattawa. I begin my introduction by looking at how Randa Jarrar uses Toni Morrison’s Beloved in one of her short stories, and I later conclude the book by framing its arguments through Beloved. The first chapter juxtaposes fiction by Rawi Hage and Laila Lalami to talk about human rights and migration. Mohja Kahf’s work on Muslim American literature is crucial to my theoretical frame, and I read her novel The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf in terms of Islamic feminisms and the umma. I discuss Rabih Alameddine’s Koolaids: The Art of War to discuss the relationship between secular discourses, LGBTQ identities, and gendered and racialized representations of Muslims and Arabs in the United States and Lebanon. Ninar Esber’s gorgeous performance and visual art is the subject of my chapter on secular interpretive practices and decolonizing museum cultures. I conclude by using Hasan Elahi’s digital art and Mounir Fatmi’s sculpture and installation art to discuss the ways in which liberal governance regulates and polices bodies and communities.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

DH: When I wrote my dissertation, and indeed published my first article from it in American Literature, I imagined Western secularism as capable of becoming more inclusive—as widening a home that could encompass more and more religious, ethnic, racial, and gendered embodiments within it. As I wrote the book, and especially as I reflected with the series editor, Carol Fadda, who continually pushed my thinking in new directions, I re-evaluated my conclusions.  Inclusivity does not change foundational structural inequities; it merely incorporates more people into the status quo while excluding others. Now I think that foundational ideologies need to be dismantled.  The scholarship I use to frame my argument—by Nadine Naber, Carol Fadda, Talal Assad, Saba Mahmoud, Waïl Hassan, and Janet Jakobsen and Anne Pelligrini among others—constructs scaffolding, and the novels and art I write about provide us with blueprints from which to build.

My other previous works are in the field of Arab American studies and range from the late-nineteenth century to contemporary literature and art. I have written about Arab performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West shows. I have also written about twenty-first-century Arab American poetry and novels as intersecting with Native and ecocritical studies, and argued that Arab American literature makes valuable and often overlooked contributions in terms of climate change. I recently finished an article on Somali American film, drama, and poetry, which emphasizes communal modes of sociality and caretaking as rights. What all of my recent work has in common is thinking comparatively and across disciplines about transnational cultural production.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have? 

DH: I hope that people interested in how religion, race, and power interact will read this book. The book takes up secular institutions that are popularly taken for granted as unambiguously good—like museums and human rights novels—and I hope it challenges readers to rethink how many of these institutions and policies are framed, especially in terms of anti-Muslim and anti-Arab racism. My goal was to write accessibly so that the book could be read widely, including outside of academia, and contribute to ongoing conversations about social justice. Of course, I hope it reaches people who love Arab literature and art, as well as people who know nothing about the subject, both of whom may find in this book new authors and artists to explore.   

J: What other projects are you working on now?

DH: Now that Interrogating Secularism is published, I am working on a number of shorter pieces as well as my second book project. I am writing an encyclopedia entry on the work of Mohja Kahf, and an essay on representations of Arab American childhood in turn-of-the-century children’s literature. Finally, I am co-authoring a book with Mukti Mangharam on the uses of literature for teaching empathy. 

J: How exactly can a work of fiction critique secularism?

DH: To give a specific example of how my reading works in the book, in my chapter on the human rights novel, I review scholarship that shows how the human of human rights discourses has long been up for debate, and how Western humanism takes as its conceptual focus the Enlightenment, autonomous, rational human subject. I then look at two novels which refuse to humanize refugees, beginning with Laila Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, which I argue writes against apprehending lives through ontologies of individualism or envisioning nation-states as solutions, instead emphasizing local economies and mutual dependency. I conclude with Rawi Hage’s Cockroach, which refuses the human altogether as the unnamed protagonist turns into an actual cockroach. The question of ethics is central to the content and form of these stories—not merely because they are human rights novels, but because they challenge this very designation by shaking up its underlying secular humanism. I give an excerpt below to demonstrate how the books do so.

 

Excerpt from the book

Navigating Bodies

“Fourteen kilometers.” These are the first words of Laila Lalami’s novel Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits. Murad, one of the five protagonists of the novel, stands on the shores of Morocco contemplating the distance to Spain: “Fourteen kilometers.  Murad has pondered that number hundreds of times in the last year, trying to decide whether the risk was worth it.” The distance is at once small and insurmountable: “Other days he could think only about the coast guards, the ice-cold water, the money he’d have to borrow, and he wondered how fourteen kilometers could separate not just two countries but two universes.”

The novel begins not with sentiment but with the fact of separation measured out numerically. The precision of the number highlights the fact that citizenship is not an abstraction – or, rather, that it is an abstraction made materials, affecting bodies and the landscapes they move upon. At the same time, the effects of citizenship create wildly disparate universes of experience and define the inhabitants of those experiential universes in terms of legality. Spain is only fourteen kilometers away, and yet that distance means everything to Murad and his fellow travelers. Only they aren’t travelers. They are refugees if readers are feeling kind, or migrants, or, more likely than not, “illegals,” a term the novel employs strategically.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits uses a rickety boat to construct a framing story around the shifting temporalities and geographies of migration. Hailed as a novel that humanizes the experiences of “boat people,” economic and political refugees who cross the ocean from North Africa to Europe, I argue that it does much more profound work than merely making refugees appear human.  It uses the minutiae of domestic drama to explore the fraught relationship between nationalism, political and economic disenfranchisement, forms of Islamic practice, and burdened masculinities and femininities. It undercuts humanizing sentimentality in favor of less concrete, more relational ways of understanding ourselves as humans, as expressed through the workings of local economies. It also does so by reconsidering existentialist, colonial formulations of humanness found in the works of authors such as Paul Bowles, as he and the tourists who read him are peripheral to the Moroccan characters. Instead of working as a framing device or lens onto Moroccan culture, Bowles and his fans are submerged in stories told from multiple perspectives, those of Faten, a devout Muslim; Halima, a struggling mother; Labin, a troubled father; and two economically disenfranchised young men, Murad and Aziz. These critical axes – the human rights narrative and its colonial foundations – come together amid the failures and successes of its protagonists as they struggle to improve their lives, troubling readerly expectations for immigrant and refugee protagonists who either assimilate nicely, accept an uneasy hybridity, or yearn uncomplicatedly for home.

Like Murad, the protagonist of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach is engaged in risky activity. He exists on the economic periphery, as a shape-shifting, antisocial thief. Through him the novel even more radically resists the humanism underlying contemporary neoliberal politics.

Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits and Cockroach resist the legalizing impulse to prove the humanity of their characters in order to make the case for their inherent rights. Rather, their protagonists upend the romanticizing tropes of the humans rights narrative and the colonial impulses of the existentialist novel. They do so by critiquing the use of legal status as a salient lens for the production and erasure of selfhood, and by questioning autonomous agency, mostly facilitated by liberal democratic institutional channels, as the only source of justice. By doing so, both texts refuse a humanitarian framework in favor of a human one.

Human rights discourses are grounded in the secular, liberal narrative of the human, and this grounding limits who is considered human and what human rights can entail. Lisa Lowe underscores the colonial underpinnings of modern liberalism, contending that as it “defined the ‘human’ and universalized its attributes to European man, it simultaneously differentiated populations in the colonies as less that human.” Therefore, “even as it proposes inclusivity, liberal universalism effects principles of inclusion and exclusion; in the very claim to define humanity, as a species or condition, its gestures of definition divide the human and the nonhuman, to classify the normative and pathologize deviance.” 

Western human rights discourses emerged via secularism because Enlightenment thinkers had to account for why people have inherent rights that are not based on religion. If human dignity no longer emanated from divinity, it must have something to do with an innate, universal human quality. The exact nature of that quality – mainly the autonomous, rational, secular individual imbued with dignity – is the basis for rights discourse that emerged in eighteenth-century political documents and continues to inform Western conceptions of rights, even as activists critique it as historically endorsing colonialism and globalization and excluding economic, social, cultural, and environmental rights. My purpose here is not to make the argument that the human of human rights discourse is, and has always been, exclusionary; that critique is evident. Rather, I examine how two novels makes rights claims, one by reworking tropes of the human rights narrative – the abused woman, the sex worker, the disenfranchised youth – the other by refusing to invoke the human at all.

Much of the work on human rights concentrates on violate bodies, and Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits challenges the hyperfocus on the body and images of its desecration, asking readers instead to consider human lives as both embodied and socially embedded. Cockroach moves in the opposite direction, with uncompromising fixation on the body in all its kinky, scatological, voracious glory. In a reversal of Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, the protagonist refuses the human altogether in favor of cockroaches. These two novels engage with dominant structures of narrative – namely humanist, secular, liberal narrations of humanness – and by doing so, reorder the human.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.