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Concrete Imaginings:
Building a Liberated Palestine
Presented by the Department of Gender, Sexuality
and Feminist Studies
Wednesday, February 28th
Panel 1: 11:30am-12:00pm Lunch, 12:00pm-1:30pm Panel
Panel 2: 1:45pm-3:15pm
Panel 3: 3:30pm-4:15pm Panel, 4:15pm-5:00pm Plenary Panel, 5:00pm-6:00pm Reception
General Admission
Pink Parlor, East Duke Building
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TICKETS REQUIRED
Free
February 6, 11 AM: Duke On-Sale
February 13, 11 AM - Public On- Sale
Duke Students and Faculty/Staff: Log in prior to selecting tickets.
or
Tune in virtually here:
https://duke.zoom.us/j/93556167414
PROGRAM
PANEL 1:
11:30 AM - 12:00 PM LUNCH
12:00 PM - 1:30 PM PANEL
“The Urgency of Anti-Imperial Feminism: Lessons from Palestine” Walaa Alqaisiya, Ca' Foscari University of Venice (via Zoom)
This talk maps the epistemic, political, and moral grounds informing the urgency of anti-imperial feminism that Palestine brings into sight. Combining decolonial and Third-Worldist Marxist theoretical approaches, the first part of the talk unpacks the functionality of gender to the onto-epistemic foundations of Zionist settler colonialism under US-led imperialism. The second part discusses how the centering of the Palestinian national question redefines the moral and political parameters of feminist and queer mobilisation. In doing so, the last part shows the limitations and tensions that post-structural feminist and queer approaches carry, when dealing with the question of liberation, violence, and development in global South contexts, such as Palestine. (25 minutes)
“Christian Zionism, Displacement, and the Role of Travel” Jennifer Kelly, University of California, Santa Cruz (via Zoom)
A central tenet of Falwell’s Moral Majority, founded in 1979, was unequivocal support for Israel and, by 1983, he began his first of many “Friendship Tours to Israel,” which included meetings with government officials and tours of Israeli military installations. Today, Christian Zionism tours follow this template, pairing pilgrimage with celebrations of Israel’s sustained displacement of Palestinians. At the center of displacement in Jerusalem, for example, is a biblical theme park—run by settlers—planned for Silwan that comprises a cable car, a seven-story Jewish cultural center on Wadi Hilweh land, and shopping centers and homes for settlers. And, during this current genocidal war on Gaza, Christian Zionists across the U.S. are once again eagerly seeing Israel’s destruction of Gaza as a sign of end times and calling for unchecked Israeli control over all of Palestine. In this paper, I show not only how tourism is never a thing apart from colonial state violence, but also how tourism is part of the fabric of a U.S. Christian Zionism that both enables and facilitates Palestinian displacement. (25 minutes)
30 minutes Q&A
BREAK
PANEL 2: 1:45 PM - 3:15 PM
"Queer Threads: Activist Fashion in Palestine" Roberto Filippello, University of AmsterdamIn this presentation I sketch the contours of the formation of an activist fashion scene across Palestine in the face of material challenges that the infrastructures of the occupation pose to the production and circulation of clothes. I theorize the creative practices of Palestinian fashion designers and image-makers as makeshift acts of collective disidentification with the ecocidal, racist, and queerphobic Zionist enterprise, and argue that “queer decolonial fashion practices” offer a model of creative activism wherein environmental ethics, anti-racism, and queer claims are fundamentally interconnected. Conjoining Gramscian analytical categories and queer epistemologies from the South, I highlight how sartorial praxis and embodiment figure in the imagination of Palestinian youth. (25 minutes)
“Laboratories of Speculation: Rethinking Jericho, ‘the City of the Moon’” Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois Chicago (via Zoom)
Critical queer feminist study has lovingly brought renewed methodological attention to long-forgotten, once-inhabited sites, archives, geographies, and histories, which can be newly reanimated for the service of contemporary collective social life. One such instance in present-day Palestine has been the international art, writing, and research residency called el-Atlal (“The Ruins”) co-founded by Karim Kattan, Victoria Dabdoub, Rebecca Topakian, Céleste Haller from 2014-2019 in the town of Jericho, the “oldest city in the world.” Given its historical heritage and complex station in the local imagination, Jericho is a generative utopian site for enacting new incubatory spaces for alternative political and aesthetic possibility in the dystopian here and now. If Palestine, and the Palestinian people subject to Israeli rule, have long served as one of the foremost paradigmatic “laboratories” for the development of late modern settler security states and their fabrication of new technologies of policing, maiming, and killing perfected on Palestinians under siege, this talk explores how we might reimagine an archetypal “Palestine” instead as an experimental site of decolonial fantasy and creative freedom, one that also portends the ends of the conjoined US/Israeli settler security states and their forever wars on terror. (25 minutes)
BREAK
PANEL 3: 3:30 PM - 4:15 PM
“Seeing Palestine, Not Seeing the Palestinians: Gaza in the British Pathé Colonial Lens” Shahd Abusalama, Lebanese American University
My presentation will critically engage with the representation of the Palestine question in general and Gaza refugees in particular by British Pathé, which, as a leading media institution of the British Empire, was also a dedicated advocate of Zionist ambitions and Jewish settlement in Mandate Palestine. While presenting corresponding reels, I will interrogate Pathé’s discursive strategies in representing the 1947-48 Nakba (Arabic: catastrophe), the 1956-7 Israeli occupation of Gaza, and Israel’s subsequent occupation of Gaza beginning in 1967, exposing its ideological framing of the Palestinian people as either “terrorists” or “helpless victims” and the glorification of the newborn state of Israel. I argue that British Pathé provided a consolidating hegemonic discourse on Palestine-Israel that prevails to this day in mainstream Western political, media, and academic discourse to shield Israel and its allies from responsibility. (25 minutes)
PLENARY PANEL: 4:15 PM - 5:00 PM
RECEPTION: 5:00 PM - 6:00 PM
BIOGRAPHIES
Dr. Shahd Abusalama (she/her) is a Palestinian scholar activist and artist, born and raised in Jabalia Refugee Camp, northern Gaza. Due to the displacement facing her family in Gaza, she will be based between London, Barcelona and Beirut in 2024. She recently started a visiting scholarship at the Lebanese American University, exploring the gendered representation of Beirut protests during the 17 October Revolution. Her Ph.D. from Sheffield Hallam University explored the historical representations of Gaza and its refugees in documentary films. It will be published by Bloomsbury this year, under the title Between Reality and Documentary. She is the author of “Palestine from My Eyes” blog, which was published as a book in ltaly in 2013. She co-founded Hawiyya Dance Company in 2017 which showcases Palestine’s folkloric Dabke and music to UK audiences and beyond to amplify antiracist causes.
Dr. Roberto Filippello (he/him) is Assistant Professor of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently working on his first monograph, provisionally titled Dressed for Dissent: Decolonial Fashion and the Queer Struggle for Palestine. Prior to joining the University of Amsterdam, he was a Killam Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of British Columbia and the recipient of a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Global Fellowship co-sponsored by the University of Melbourne and Sapienza Università di Roma. He works across the fields of Critical Fashion Studies, Queer Studies, and Middle Eastern Studies. His research investigates how fashion has been used across various historical contexts, in particular in the Mediterranean and Middle East and North Africa regions, to shape spaces of political expression and community formation.
Dr. Ronak K. Kapadia (he/him) is Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and affiliated faculty in Art History, Global Asian Studies, and Museum & Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago. His interdisciplinary research engages critical ethnic studies, transnational queer and feminist studies, visual culture and performance studies, and critical studies of US empire and the national security state. Kapadia’s first book, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Duke University Press 2019) was awarded the 2020 Surveillance Studies Network Best Book Prize. Insurgent Aesthetics theorizes the queer world-making power of contemporary art responses to US militarism in the Greater Middle East. It examines the race-radical queer feminist visions, sensations, and freedom dreams of transnational South and Southwest Asian visual art and aesthetics in the context of contemporary US global state violence and its forever wars of security and terror in the Greater Middle East. Kapadia is co-curator of the 2023 Veteran Art Triennial, co-editor of the forthcoming Surviving the Long Wars: Creative Rebellion at the Ends of Empire and at work on a second solo book project, Breathing in the Brown Queer Commons, which examines queer and trans migrant futurisms in visual culture and performance art to develop a critical theory of healing justice and pleasure in the wilds of ecological chaos and US imperial decline.
Dr. Jennifer Lynn Kelly (she/her) is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University), is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine for the Detours Series at Duke University Press. She is also a founding collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter
Dr. Walaa Alqaisiya is a Marie Curie Global Fellow working across Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy) and Columbia University (USA). She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University (UK) and worked as a Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Conflict at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics. Her book Decolonial Queering in Palestine (Routledge 2023) engages how Palestinian queer politics and aesthetics challenge the complex web of gendered, sexualised, and racialised constituents in the Zionist settler-colonial project whilst offering future imagining of free Palestine beyond the Oslo historical impasse. Her Marie Curie Fellowship extends her work on settler colonialism, decoloniality and gender whilst bringing an ecological dimension to these fields. The project draws on Turtle Island and Palestine locales of Indigeneity to examine comparable historical and political processes of settler colonial ecocidal violence and the value of Indigenous ecologies.
The Beyond Concrete Imaginings conference is convened by Frances S. Hasso (she/her) as part of The Palestine Seminar (GSF 648), Spring 2024. Hasso is Professor of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies, History, and Sociology at Duke University. She is a widely published scholar of the Arab world and Palestine, most recently Buried in the Red Dirt: Race, Reproduction and Death in Modern Palestine (Cambridge 2022) and “Beyond the Treatment Room: The Psyche-Body-Society Care Politics of Cairo’s El-Nadeem” in Signs: Journal of Women and Culture in Society (2023, Vol. 49:1). She is grateful to GSF staff, students, and colleagues as well as all academic units and individuals at Duke who have helped make the conference and The Palestine Seminar possible through their labor and support.
Sponsors: Department of Gender, Sexuality and Feminist Studies and John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute
