The Center for Racial Justice

The Center for Racial Justice is very proud to sponsor the second annual Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement series! Please join us for the following talk with Sherena Razek:

Heat, Smoke, Suture: Fire as Elemental Intifada in Colonized Palestine

Date: Wednesday, 10/15

Time: 3 pm

Location: Humanities 1, Room 210

This presentation counter-maps the greenwashing of the Israeli monocultured settler pine forests planted over the ruins of ethnically cleansed Palestinian villages with the Indigenous Palestinian grounded knowledge of al-hariqa lands–an Arabic term that has long been used by Palestinian farmers to chart and name land predisposed to burn. Dr. Razek considers how the scorched earth of al-hariqa lands in conversation with the use of fire and smoke in Palestinian protests to shield revolting bodies comprise co-constitutive expressions of elemental intifada. Through a close study of the material transformations of heat and flame, the firescapes of the elemental intifada reveal the incompatibility of settler-colonial occupation with the land while also making possible a more capacious understanding of resistance to the ongoing human and environmental Nakba of Zionist settler colonization during worsening climate catastrophes of planetary scope.

Sherena Razek is the UC President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Gender at UCLA. She is a diasporic Palestinian feminist educator, scholar, activist, and labor organizer. Her research focuses on Palestinian visual culture, anti-imperial struggle, and decolonial feminist ecologies.