Call For Papers: 'Locating Palestine in the Arab Americas'

Call For Papers: "Locating Palestine in the Arab Americas"

Call For Papers: "Locating Palestine in the Arab Americas"

By : Jadaliyya Reports

Call for Papers: "Locating Palestine in the Arab Americas" Workshop

September 13–16, 2024

Khayrallah Center, North Carolina State University


Palestinians have long conceived their liberation struggle as a transnational, anti-colonial movement that must necessarily build alliances with other marginalized and displaced peoples. The Americas – North, South, and Central – constitute one of the key sites of this struggle, not least due to the existence of large Arab communities across the region. Despite this, we are still in the early stages of understanding how the Arab communities of the Americas have engaged with the Palestinian struggle and how, in turn, Palestinians have related to these communities. This workshop brings these interactions to the center stage, inviting participants to consider the various meanings Palestine has held for the Arab Americas.

There are tens of millions of people across the Americas who identify in some way as Arab, forming important and varied voices in the region’s social and political landscape, from New York to Santiago de Chile. Historically, the Palestinian cause has mobilized and galvanized these populations in myriad ways, often serving as a unifying, community-building issue, while at other times creating cleavages and tensions. Within these communities, Palestinians themselves have played important roles as organizers, activists, artists, and political leaders.

This workshop seeks to expand on existing conversations and open new ones on the importance of Palestine in the wider American mahjar (land of migration), inviting contributions from scholars, writers, and activists. We particularly encourage applications from those working in Spanish and Portuguese language contexts with the aim of placing Latin America and the Caribbean into closer dialogue with Anglophone North America.

We welcome proposals that address the following broad questions:

  • How has the Palestinian struggle sought to build participation and alliances among the Arab communities of the Americas?
  • What meanings have the Arab communities of the Americas attributed to Palestine?
  • In what ways have Arab communities in the Americas related to the concepts of Palestine and Palestinian liberation, and how does this connect to other political and social struggles?
  • How has the Palestinian cause among Arab Americans intersected with gender, class, and race?
  • How have movements of Palestinian solidarity sought to connect across national and regional borders in the Americas? What new strategies are emerging in the Americas for combatting anti-Palestinian repression and legislation?
  • What kinds of sources exist (historical and contemporary) to examine the importance of Palestine to Arab communities in the Americas? How and where should these sources be documented and recorded?

This workshop is co-organized by The Middle East and North Africa Centre at the University of Sussex, the Centro de Estudios Árabes at the University of Chile, and the Khayrallah Center at North Carolina State University.

The workshop will be held September 13–16, 2024, at the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina. The organizers will cover the costs of housing and meals for participants during the conference and will be able to provide some support toward travel.

Selected papers will be solicited for a special issue of the Khayrallah Center’s journal, Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North Africa Migration Studies. All fields of discussion will be considered, including (but not limited to): History, literature, visual arts, film, politics, anthropology, sociology, and geography. Likewise, works that explore interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary perspectives are welcome. A PDF of this announcement is available via this link.

Click here to read this announcement in Spanish.

Submission

To be considered for this workshop and subsequent volume, we ask that interested authors submit a 300-word abstract via Mashriq & Mahjar’s submission portal. Authors may wish to consult the journal’s guidelines for writing effective abstracts. Abstract submissions are due April 1, 2024.

Authors of selected abstracts will be invited to submit papers of 5,000–6,000 words by August 15, 2024.

Abstract submissions, full-length papers, and conference presentations will be accepted in Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic and English.

Questions may be directed to the journal’s managing editor at mashriq_mahjar@ncsu.edu.

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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