Productive Discomforts: Black-Palestine Solidarity
Thursday, January 24th, 2018
Haines Hall 153
4:00pm
Black-Palestine solidarity has witnessed a resurgence since 2014, when in the midst of Israel’s unprecedented assault on Gaza, Ferguson erupted in protest following the police murder of unarmed eighteen-year-old Michael Brown. Many echoes bridged the miles dividing these two places: Gaza and Ferguson. There was the lone figure in a cloud of tear gas facing down a tank; the bravery of individuals willing to risk life and limb; and the sight of many bodies coming together, if only for a moment, to act as one under the force of military assault.
These echoes invited organizers to exchange strategies, ideas, and tools. They invited scholars and activists to return to the historical trajectory of Black-Palestine solidarity and explore the alternative futures it offered. Today in 2019, the triumph of settler colonialism and white supremacy makes the search for alternative futures as urgent as ever. If imagination is an act of bravery, so too is embracing the limits and challenges ahead. By engaging historical encounters and intersections of race, power and empire, drawn from family archives, this talk reflects on the productivity, and necessity, of discomfort in forging solidarities and futures.
Sherene Seikaly is Associate Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Seikaly’s Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2016) explores how Palestinian capitalists and British colonial officials used economy to shape territory, nationalism, the home, and the body. Her next book project, From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine follows the trajectory of a peripatetic medical doctor to place Palestine in a global history of race, capital, slavery, and dispossession. She is the editor of Arab Studies Journal, co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya e-zine, and an editor of Journal of Palestine Studies.