The December 2013 American Studies Association vote to join the academic boycott of Israeli institutions generated an intense public conversation. But it represented just one moment in the decades long struggle of Palestinians against the Israeli settler colonial state. This Periscope represents a next moment. Based on presentations at the February 28-March 1, 2014, NYU American Studies Program conference Circuits of Influence: US, Israel Palestine, the included essays aim to further expand international support for this ongoing Palestinian labor. Edited by Lisa Duggan
Rumor has it that the American Studies Association is going down in flames. Since our membership voted by a 2 to 1 margin last fall to join the academic boycott of Israeli universities, the mainstream and tabloid press have … Continue reading “Circuits of Influence”
The Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adichie says, “Power is the ability not just to tell the story of another person, but to make it the definitive story of that person. The Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti writes that if you want … Continue reading “Rethinking the Single Story: BDS, Transnational Cross Movement Building and the Palestine Analytic”
The following appears reprinted from Tidal Occupy Theory. We present this pamphlet at an historic moment in the United States, and by extension the broader geopolitical order over which the United States presides. In recent months, the shackles that … Continue reading “Palestine, Boycott, and Beyond: The Time is Now”
It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist. — Golda Meir in 1969, … Continue reading “Conversation and Its Discontents”
As an Asian American studies scholar informed by Critical Indigenous studies and American studies, I attend the annual meetings of the American Studies Association (ASA), Association for Asian American Studies (AAAS), and the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association … Continue reading “Alternative Futures Beyond the Settler State”
A boycott is a difficult and demanding political tactic. To understand the logic of boycott politics, especially in relation to the Palestinian campaign for a cultural and academic boycott of Israel, one needs to locate it within a broader … Continue reading “Historicizing Palestinian Boycott Politics”
The archives of Howard University’s student newspaper The Hilltop might seem an unlikely place to find evidence of a revolutionary Iranian student movement in the U.S. Yet the rowdy bunch of Iranian foreign students enrolled in the 1960s and … Continue reading “New Directions in American Studies”
Serving as ASA President since the boycott has convinced me that U.S. national belonging is increasingly predicated on identification with Israel and disavowal of the violence made possible by its “special relationship” with the U.S. In “Academic Freedom with … Continue reading “Occupation Spin”
Over the last few years, Israel and Palestine have become major topics of interest and debate for scholars who do American Studies. This is evident in burgeoning comparative analyses of settler colonialisms, militarized borders, intersections of racialization and revolutionary … Continue reading “Comparing American and Israeli Ways of War”
An important achievement of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement has been to help render the Question of Palestine more legible by releasing it from the framework of conflict resolution that has thus far dominated the peace process, the … Continue reading “Back to History and Judgment”
The U.S./Israel special relationship is at once affective, geopolitically strategic, and rooted in economics. In this essay I suggest that the neo-liberalization of the U.S. economy during the Reagan administration was tied to the formation of international free trade … Continue reading “Peace Dividends”
On July 9, 2005, over 170 civil society organizations signed onto the Palestinian Call for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) against Israel. The Call, grounded in a history of the use of boycott by Palestinians and inspired by the … Continue reading “The Efficacy of the Palestinian BDS Movement”
Ilya Schapiro of the right-wing Cato Institute recently appeared on Chris Hayes’ show on MSNBC to defend Arizona bill SB 1062 that would have allowed merchants to refuse service to LGBTQ customers under the guise of “religious freedom.” Schapiro … Continue reading “Locke Down on BDS?”
