17:45 Palestine time
15:45 UK time
10:45 USA EDT
Living Liberation: Histories of Palestinian Anti-Colonialism Since 1948
With Professor Abdul Razzaq Takriti
Palestine is often viewed through the lens of victimhood. In contrast, this talk offers an invitation to approach it from the standpoint of liberation. It discusses the ways in which Palestinian women and men responded to the structures of colonial settlement, expulsion, dispossession, violence – and discursive as well as physical erasure – through emancipatory anti-colonial practices and imaginaries.
Engaging the writings and oral testimonies of Palestinian revolutionaries, it will provide an overview of the trajectories of the Palestinian struggle in the post-1948 Nakba period, probing how the pursuit of justice enabled a people bearing the hefty burden of colonialism to produce flourishing structures, cultures, and social bonds of resistance.
The talk will also present some of the challenges brought about by the contemporary dismantlement of representative Palestinian structures, and the role of countries like Britain in this process. Without ignoring the enormous pressures produced by accumulated experiences of oppression, it cautions against western human rights frameworks (and the psychiatric narratives that derive from them) that pathologize individual suffering under colonialism, insisting instead on forms of solidarity that center the affirming power of collective quests for dignity and freedom.
Abdel Razzaq Takriti is a Palestinian organiser and historian. He is Associate Professor, Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History, and Director of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. He is the co-author, with Karma Nabulsi, of the Palestinian Revolution website learnpalestine.politics.ox.ac.uk, which received the 2020 Middle East Studies Association of North America Undergraduate Education Award.