Look at the world that was blind to us before and how it sees us now. –Ibrahim Nasrallah, translated by Huda J. Fakhreddine, Palestinian: Four Poems Here are some notes from the two days of Nicholas Mirzoeff’s Bay Area … Continue reading ““All-over-the-placelessness”: I Read To See in the Dark from the Inside Out”
How to do things with being undone? How to forge solidary bonds in the dark of the rubble of a world destroyed but also the dark of a collective unconscious, a night, a space for sounding otherwise? To open Nicholas … Continue reading “To Bond in the Dark”
I would like to take this opportunity to contextualize Nicholas Mirzoeff’s To See in the Dark as part of VAGABONDS, the series of short, pamphlet-like books I edit for Pluto Press. I founded VAGABONDS in 2020 based on three frustrations. … Continue reading “A Vagabond in the Rubble, a Book in the Dark”
Patricia J. Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg: Notes on Race, Human Bodies, and the Spirit of the Law (The New Press, 2024) opens with a meditation on bodily and spiritual integrity, the distinction between constitutional and contractual law, … Continue reading “Black Limbs, White Laws: On Patricia J. Williams’s The Miracle of the Black Leg“
In this important conversation and dossier about ways to enact transnational feminist solidarity with Palestinians from the perspective of women scholars from the Middle East and Asia, I share my insights on war and imperialism in Afghanistan. I comparatively explore … Continue reading “Livestreaming and Deadstreaming: On the Optics, Politics, and Effects of Violent Imagery in Comparative Perspective”
This essay was my contribution to the panel Global and Transnational Approaches to Race and Racism at the Inaugural British Journal of Sociology Conference, 15-16 April 2024 at the London School of Economics. I am grateful to Ghada Majadli and … Continue reading “Social Theory after* Gaza? Witnessing the Transnational Circuits of Race-Making”
This text is adapted from the opening plenary of the 2023 conference of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism. Counterinsurgency: Beyond Weaponized Definitions The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s spreading institutionalized definition of antisemitism is not merely weaponized, it … Continue reading ““Antisemitism” as Asymmetric Warfare: The Casualties of a Definition”
The so-called global Left, especially within the settlercolonial US-Canadian scene, is discombobulated. “End the Occupation” and “From the River to the Sea,” like Tahrir Square’s 2011 Orientalized so-called Arab Spring chant “Bread, Freedom, and Social Justice,” have turned into prophetic … Continue reading “It Is a Racial-Religious War: Organizing and a 1492 Transnational Movement Framing”
Dear world, This letter is a reclamation. It is a prayer to the universe. It is a plea for you to bear witness. Often, writing demands to be lyrical, poetic, and beautiful. Even when we write about our struggles, there … Continue reading “Gridlocks of Death, Oceans of Life”
On Monday, April 29, thirteen undergraduate students and one professor occupied Clio Hall on the campus of Princeton University in an attempt to force the administration to meet their demands for a revision of university relations with the state of … Continue reading “Pedagogy Against Genocide”
فَلَمْ تَقْتُلُوهُمْ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ قَتَلَهُمْ ۚ وَمَا رَمَيْتَ إِذْ رَمَيْتَ وَلَـٰكِنَّ ٱللَّهَ رَمَىٰ ۚ وَلِيُبْلِىَ ٱلْمُؤْمِنِينَ مِنْهُ بَلَآءً حَسَنًا ۚ إِنَّ ٱللَّهَ سَمِيعٌ عَلِيمٌۭ And you do not kill them, but it was Allah who killed them. And you … Continue reading “On Responsibility: Critique and Colonization After October 7th”
Will Eizlini, an American artist of French Jewish descent, tells me that he has been crying every day. When not crying, he is making a series of paintings interpreting the massacres in Gaza—crimson landscapes of sea, sky, dunes, with piles … Continue reading “The Burden of Witnessing”
In December 2003, Ariel Sharon, the former Israeli prime minister, announced in a televised speech Israel’s plans to “disengage” from its control of Gaza through the complete withdrawal of Israeli soldiers and the removal of Israeli settlements from Gaza after … Continue reading “Trapped Between Spaces: Gaza’s Existential Struggle”
In Itamar Moses’s new play The Ally, the “trickiest question”—“whether the fight against anti-Semitism belongs as a coequal branch of the social justice movement”—is itself a kind of trick question. Articulated through Moses’s academic alter ego in the play, Asaf … Continue reading “Parsing the Jewish American Complex”
These words are meant to land in your ears as piercing sounds to accompany the wrenching horrors crowding our screens. Do not be fooled by the silence of print. This writing clamors to be screamed. Gaza is not some eerie … Continue reading “This is a scream and I dare you to publish it!”
