Part of the Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement Speaking Series

Thursday, April 24, 2025 4:00pm-6:00pm | Zoom

Register Here: https://ucsc.zoom.us/meeting/register/aiwZAJPTSS2NrUcA9f4Z9g

Analyses of Palestinian poetics often expose the violent structure of ongoing-Nakba — the Zionist settler-colonial uprooting and removal of Palestinians (both physically from the land and physiologically from life) since 1948. Thinking beyond colonial epistemology, however, is not merely a task of refuting settler-colonial narratives but of dismantling the very ways of knowing that produce them. This talk re-centers a Palestinian analytic through the lens of "radicality," which encompasses both Palestinian rootedness and revolutionary movement. This radicality both predates and regenerates in contravention of settler colonialism's violent uprootings/removals, unsettling colonial-national constructs of spatial belonging, and cohering the decolonization of literary analysis to then decolonization of our physical geographies. Palestinian writers navigate the dynamic tensions between rootedness and movement to forge liberatory pathways, opening up alternative horizons of political and creative possibility.