LIVE EVENT - Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond (September 2, Online Event)

New Article Submission

Thank you for your interest in Jadaliyya. We welcome all submissions. The most significant requirement is for Jadaliyya submissions to be analytically compelling and offer a perspective or argument that has not been covered at length either on Jadaliyya or elsewhere. Because of the volume of submissions, well-written pieces are prioritized. Length is flexible, 1000 to 2500 words is the average range. However, we will accept longer pieces. Once submitted, several members of the editorial committee will review your piece and one of them will inform you of the decision.
Author Details
Article Details
Select Countries
Select Keywords
Select Topics
Only RTF, Word, and Pages documents accepted.

Recommended image size: 762x800 px

Location of each image should be indicated in the text of the article via a square bracket caption that includes: (1) a description of the image; (2) the photographer/designer and source of the image. Please note we only use images you as the author have the right to use, which usually means those of your own creation or those published under Creative Commons. Alternatively, you need specific permission from the copyright holder.
Please read the Release Form and provide an electronic signature [your full name] below to confirm that you accept its terms
Required
Hyperlink words in your article if they refer to links on the internet. We encourage more, rather than less, links (try to avoid footnotes—embed them as hyperlinks if possible)

Article added successfully.

Pages Menu BETA
Aug 23, 2021
LIVE EVENT - Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond (September 2, Online Event)

LIVE EVENT - Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond (September 2, Online Event)

By : Jadaliyya Reports

The Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism presents

Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond

Thursday, September 2, 5:30-9:00 (online event)
Register for the event here: http://tiny.cc/sep2cuny 

Panel One, 5:30-7:00pm: Palestine Solidarity, Anti-Colonialism, and Labor Unions: Myths and Realities


Thayer Hastings (Moderator), PhD Student in Anthropology, CUNY Graduate Center

  1. Noura Erakat, Associate Professor of Africana Studies, Rutgers University
  2. Suzanne Adely, President-Elect, National Lawyers Guild & Co-Director, Food Chain Workers Alliance
  3. Nerdeen Kiswani, Chair and Founder, Within Our Lifetime - United for Palestine
  4. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Professor Emerita of Ethnic Studies, California State University, East Bay
     

Panel Two, 7:30-9:00pm: Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonialist Struggles at CUNY and Beyond


Maureen Pierce-Anyan (Moderator), Director of Minority Student Affairs, Queens College

  1. Huma Dar, Adjunct Professor of Critical Studies, California College of the Arts
  2. Johanna Fernández, Associate Professor of History, Baruch College
  3. Conor Tomás Reed, Africana Studies and American Studies, Brooklyn College
  4. Alexandra Moffett-Bateau, Assistant Professor of Political Science, John Jay College
     

The Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism is proud to present a two-panel symposium, Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond. A distinguished group of scholar-activists, including Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Noura Erakat, Johanna Fernández, and Alexandra Moffett-Bateau will lend their expertise on global struggles against racism and colonialism and draw connections with local struggles within CUNY and the Professional Staff Congress (PSC). Too often, discussions of settler colonialism are side-tracked by those who claim the realities are “too difficult for non-experts to understand,” or that discussions of colonialism and racism must involve “multiple perspectives.” But taking up an anti-colonial perspective means insisting that the only two “sides” in the struggle against racism and colonialism are complicity or resistance. Reckoning with Colonialism is a call to begin advancing a truly anti-colonialist perspective at CUNY. 

In the first panel, “Palestine Solidarity, Anti-Colonialism, and Labor Unions: Myths and Realities,” speakers will advance the discussion prompted by the FAQ on “Palestine and the PSC” that the Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism developed in response to the PSC-CUNY Resolution in Support of the Palestinian People. Topics include: the US as a settler state with a long history of antagonistic relationships to Indigenous Nations; BDS as an anti-racist and anti-colonial movement; the role of unions in international struggles against racism and colonialism; and student-centered perspectives on the relationship between a CUNY education and state violence at home and abroad. 

The second panel, “Anti-Racist and Anti-Colonialist Struggles at CUNY and Beyond,” furthers the discussion of settler colonialism by defining social justice as a CUNY-specific matter. Speakers will draw upon the long history of social justice organizing at CUNY and throughout New York City, as well as contemporary anti-racist and anti-colonial activism by students, staff, and faculty at CUNY, addressing four distinct global struggles against colonialism: historical and contemporary anti-racism and anti-colonial solidarity at CUNY since the 1960s; connections between Palestinian liberation and Black Politics in the US; parallels between settler colonial rule in Kashmir and in Palestine; and deconstructing the settler colonial logics in our current discourse around race, Latin America, and immigration. 

Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond  kicks off a month of teach-ins related to social justice, anti-colonialism, and anti-racism at CUNY and beyond. The symposium and teach-ins are organized by the Cross CUNY Working Group Against Racism and Colonialism, a collection of conscientious CUNY staff, faculty, students, PSC union members, and activists committed to anti-racism and ending settler colonialism. Please contact us at NoRacismCUNY@protonmail.com for more information or to join the struggle.

RSVP for Reckoning with Colonialism: Anti-Racist Struggle at CUNY & Beyond here: http://tiny.cc/sep2cuny

Share the event on Facebook
Help us promote this event by sharing materials in our Media Kit.

 

About the Speakers: 


Suzanne Adely is a labor and community organizer and human rights attorney who has worked in New York, Chicago, Egypt, India, and other locations on a spectrum of labor and human rights initiatives. A graduate of CUNY School of Law, she is President-Elect of the National Lawyers Guild and Co-Director of the Food Chain Workers Alliance (FCWA), a coalition of 33 worker-based organizations organizing at the frontlines of the food supply chain in the U.S. and Canada. She is the founder of the Global Worker Solidarity Network, a social media site that has facilitated bottom-up support for worker campaigns around the globe. She is the co-chair of the International Labor Justice Working Group and International Committee of the National Lawyers Guild, bureau member of the International Association of Democratic Lawyers, and a long time Arab-American community organizer. She has also worked as a civil rights coordinator with Desis Rising Up and Moving (DRUM) in Queens, NY, and a legal worker with the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (Cairo). Suzanne is the daughter of Jordanian workers and grew up in Yonkers, New York. For 10 years, she worked as a high school teacher in New York City and Cairo. She is a long-time member of Al-Awda-NY, the National Lawyers Guild, and the Defend the Egyptian Revolution Committee of New York.

Huma Dar is an Adjunct Professor of Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. Dar's paternal family was ethnically-cleansed from Kashmir in 1948/49 for their politics supporting the Kashmiris' right to self-determination, and maternal family—exiled from Kashmir after accepting Islam during the Dogra regime—fought for Independence from the British. With an interdisciplinary background in South Asian, Film, and Gender Studies, Dar’s work is focused on the intersections and co-formations of race, religion, class, caste, gender, sexuality, and national politics of South Asia, centered on intellectual and political activism for social justice, especially in Indian Occupied Kashmir. Dar is a founding member of the Working Group on “Muslim Identities & Cultures,” based at the Center for Race & Gender and the Townsend Center, and organized the feminist conference, Boundaries in Question on the theme of “Women and War,” both at UC Berkeley.

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz is professor emerita of Ethnic Studies at California State University, East Bay. She has been active in the international Indigenous movement for more than four decades and is known for her lifelong commitment to national and international social justice issues and her work as an anti-colonial activist. She is the author of twelve books, including An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, which received the 2015 American Book Award, and the just-published Not “A Nation of Immigrants”: Settler Colonialism, White Supremacy, and a History of Erasure and Exclusion (Beacon Press, 2021). She was awarded the Lannan Cultural Freedom Prize in 2017.

Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney, Associate Professor of Africana Studies at Rutgers University, and non-resident fellow of the Religious Literacy Project at Harvard Divinity School. Noura is the author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019), which received the Palestine Book Award and the Bronze Medal for the Independent Publishers Book Award in Current Events/Foreign Affairs. She is co-founding editor of Jadaliyya and editorial board member of the Journal of Palestine Studies. She has served as Legal Counsel for a Congressional Subcommittee in the US House of Representatives, as Legal Advocate for the Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Refugee and Residency Rights, and as national organizer of the US Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation. Noura has also produced video documentaries, including "Gaza In Context" and "Black Palestinian Solidarity." She has appeared on CBS News, CNN, Fox News, and NPR, among others.  

Johanna Fernández is associate professor of History at Baruch College of the City University of New York and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History, recipient in 2021 of the New York Society Library’s New York City Book Award and three Organization of American Historians (OAH) awards: the prestigious Frederick Jackson Turner award for best first book in history, the Liberty Legacy Foundation award for best book on civil rights and the Merle Curti award for best Social History. Dr. Fernández’s 2014 Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) lawsuitagainst the NYPD led to the recovery of the "lost" Handschu files, the largest repository of police surveillance records in the country, namely over one million surveillance files of New Yorkers compiled by the NYPD between 1954-1972, including those of Malcolm X. She’s also the host of the morning show A New Day at 99.5 FM in New York on Pacifica’s WBAI, M-F, 7-8am.

Nerdeen Kiswani is a Palestinian organizer from New York City. She is the founder and chair of Within Our Lifetime - United for Palestine, a community-based Palestinian-led organization whose goal is to revitalize the revolutionary spirit of the Palestinian community abroad in pursuit of a free homeland. She is also a rising 3L law student at the CUNY School of Law, where she is the president of Students for Justice in Palestine. Nerdeen has been centrally involved in several coalitions for Palestine, speaking for the Palestinian cause at international conferences, and has organized successful campaigns on and off campus ranging from boycotting Israeli dates, to demanding accountability from politicians regarding their stance on Palestine and organizing rallies in the thousands for Palestine in NYC. Most recently Nerdeen has led efforts along with student organizers to protect Palestinian speech CUNY-wide and has received the support of CUNY Law School for doing so. 

Alexandra Moffett-Bateau is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY. Professor Moffett-Bateau’s intellectual work focuses on race, gender, and politics, urban politics, and political behavior, with broad specialties in American Politics and Political Theory. Her manuscript in progress examines the impact spatial and aesthetic realities in residential neighborhoods have on political engagement and political identity development. Her research agenda is centrally concerned with the external forces that shape individual political capacity. Specifically, she is invested in thinking about how the intersections of race, class, and gender can make populations especially vulnerable to the spaces they live in, the conditions within which they work, and the actions of local government actors in their neighborhoods and cities. The sum total of her work argues that spatial and governmental realities can have a significant impact on the extent to which an individual can imagine political possibilities for herself or others. Environments that are violent, isolated, and toxic all function to limit the citizenship development of citizens in a way that is troubling to the functioning of democracy in the United States.  

Conor Tomás Reed is a Puerto Rican/Irish gender-fluid scholar-organizer at Brooklyn College, a contributing editor with LÁPIZ Journal and Lost & Found: The CUNY Poetics Document Initiative, and a co-founding participant in Free CUNY and Rank and File Action (RAFA). Conor is completing a book, New York Liberation School, about the rise of Black, Puerto Rican, and Women's Studies and movements at the City College of New York and in New York City, as well as co-editing a quadrilingual anthology of Black Feminist Studies in the Americas and the Caribbean.

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Lies, Deceit, and Criminality: Israel & the United States Attack Iran (Part II)

      Lies, Deceit, and Criminality: Israel & the United States Attack Iran (Part II)

      Join us for Part II of our series on the US-Israeli attack on Iran as we discuss the US' recent bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities as well as their national and regional implications.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Hatem Bazian addresses the historical trajectory of Islamophobia and its significance in understanding geopolitical transformation in the post-Cold War world. As Western ideologues shifted from their focus on the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and increasingly adopted the Clash of Civilizations paradigm to undergird their maintenance of global hegemony, Islam and Muslims replaced communism as the chief bogeyman. Bazian explains how and why this came about, and the centrality Palestine played in its development and operation, both in the West and for Israel. He also addresses US government disciplining of universities and particularly student activists.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.
Feb 16, 2011 Lebanon
Jadaliyya Reports By :
Jadaliyya Reports

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 

[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412