Speaking Out of Place

Critical political theorists Adom Getachew and Ayça Çubukçu discuss the colonial history of the international system, resistance strategies by marginalized groups, reimagining left internationalism beyond nation-states, challenges of settler colonialism, and promoting global solidarity through non-state-centric organizing and inclusive translations.

Today we talk with Camilla Hawthorne about her recent edited collection, The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity, and its relation to her prior monograph, Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean. She explains and elaborates on how Blackness is not singular, but involved in “taking place” in imaginative, resistant, and across many different political terrains, whether it be citizenship, the right to the city, the imagining of futures after environmental collapse, and diverse linguistic, cultural, and musical affiliations across diasporic communities.Camilla Hawthorne is Associate Professor of Sociology and Critical Race & Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and also serves as program director and faculty member for the Black Europe Summer School in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Her work addresses the racial politics of migration and citizenship and the insurgent geographies of the Black Mediterranean. Camilla is co-editor of the The Black Mediterranean: Bodies, Borders, and Citizenship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and The Black Geographic: Praxis, Resistance, Futurity (Duke University Press, 2023), and is author of Contesting Race and Citizenship: Youth Politics in the Black Mediterranean (Cornell University Press, 2022). In 2020, she was named as one of the national Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera‘s 110 "Women of the Year" for her work on the Black diaspora in Italy. Camilla received her PhD in Geography from the University of California, Berkeley in 2018.  

Guests Sherene Seikaly & Andrew Ross discuss organizing National Faculty for Justice in Palestine with 100 chapters in the US. Topics include the growth of pro-Palestinian activism, challenges faced on university campuses, evolution of academic activism, and the importance of collective support and solidarity in resistance movements.

Professors Amahl Bishara and Nayrouz Abu Hatoum discuss Palestinian political expression, fragmentation, and unity. They explore how boundaries impact national identity, cultural commitments, and forms of unity through art, media, and demonstrations. The conversation delves into personal reflections, political struggles within Israel and the West Bank, solidarity among political prisoners, resistance dynamics, witnessing Palestinian death, ecocide in Gaza, and the significance of love, care, and resistance in the Palestinian context.

In January, the University of Michigan Faculty Senate passed a resolution  calling for “the University’s leadership, including the Board of Regents, to divest from its financial holdings in companies that invest in Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza.” The statement highlighted the unprecedented rate of civilian deaths in Gaza, and that American financial sources are central to Israel’s ongoing genocide. Working with Students Allied for Freedom and Equality (SAFE), the TAHRIR Coalition, and Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine, and others, the resolution drew on the tradition of activism against South Africa’s apartheid regime, and ongoing anti-racist work.Today we speak with members of the UM faculty, who tell us about the background of the resolution, the work they did to pass it, and the campaigns on campus that are building off its success. Our conversation offers a range of insights that will be useful to campus activists elsewhere.Charlotte Karem Albrecht is an Associate Professor of American Culture and Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, where she is also core faculty in the Arab and Muslim American Studies program and affiliated faculty for the Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies and the Race, Law, and History Program. Her research interests include Arab American history, histories of gender and sexuality, women of color feminist theory, queer of color critique, and interdisciplinary historicist methods. Her first book, Possible Histories: Arab Americans and the Queer Ecology of Peddling, was published open access with University of California Press. Karem Albrecht holds a Ph.D. in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota. Her work has also been published in Arab Studies Quarterly, Gender & History, the Journal of American Ethnic History, and multiple edited collections.Leila Kawar is Associate Professor at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor where she holds appointments in the Department of American Culture and in the Social Theory and Practice Program. Kawar’s research examines the cultural dimensions of legal practice, focusing on how legal advocacy intersects with the politics of migration, citizenship, and labor. Her first book, Contesting Immigration Policy in Court: Legal Activism and Its Radiating Effects in the United States and France (Cambridge University Press 2015) asks what difference law has made in immigration policymaking in the U.S. and France since the 1970s. Challenging the conventional wisdom that “cause litigation” has little long-term impact unless it produces broad rights-protective principles, the book shows that legal contestation can have important radiating effects by reshaping how political actors approach immigration issues. Her current book project, Conditioning Human Mobility: Rights, Regulation, and the Transnational Construction of the Migrant Worker, is an empirically-grounded study that critically examines international law’s historical and contemporary entanglements with migrant labor recruitment. Kawar is a regular contributor to the Detroit-based socialist journal Against the Current. Derek R. Peterson is Ali Mazrui Professor of History and African Studies at the University of Michigan, and an elected member of the Faculty Senate Assembly. 

Today we speak with publisher Judith Gurewich and translator Luke Leafgren about a remarkable first-person narrative by Nasser Abu Srour, a Palestinian political prisoner who in 1993 was given a life sentence. His memoir, The Tale of a Wall, tells of the author’s decades-long life in multiple prisons, moving through many historical periods and shifting personal and political lives. The one thing that is always present is the figure of the wall, that becomes his one constant companion. Gurewich and Leafgren tell how they came to acquire the text, and how they came to know this remarkable man through it. The tale itself is a stunning and moving contribution to our understanding of the Palestinian struggle for liberation.Nasser Abu Srour was arrested in 1993, accused of being an accomplice to the murder of an Israeli intelligence officer, and sentenced to life in prison. While incarcerated, Abu Srour completed the final semester of a bachelor’s degree in English from Bethlehem University, and obtained a master’s degree in political science from Al-Quds University. The Tale of a Wall is his first book to appear in English. It will be published in the United Kingdom by Allen Lane, and translations are forthcoming from Gallimard, Feltrinelli, and Galaxia Gutenberg, among others. Judith Gurewich is the publisher of Other Press, a position she has held since 2002. Under her leadership, Other Press has become a highly respected and award-winning publisher of literary fiction and non-fiction, including titles such as Sarah Bakewell’s How to Live: A Life of Montaigne, Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, and Raja Shehadeh’s We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I, a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award. Born in Canada and raised in Belgium, she holds a law degree from Brussels University as well as a master’s of law from Columbia University and a PhD in sociology from Brandeis University. She now resides in Cambridge, MA. Judith is also a Lacanian trained psychoanalyst, practicing part-time.Luke Leafgren is an Assistant Dean of Harvard College, where he is also a lecturer in Comparative Literature and teaches courses on translation. He has published seven translations of contemporary Arabic novels and received the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2018 and 2023.      

Ever since the beginning of Israel’s genocidal attacks on Gaza, global protests have grown exponentially. This is most evident on the streets, and also, very importantly, on college campuses, where activism for Palestinian liberation have often been met with brutal repression.  Chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace have been shut down, students placed under surveillance and disciplined, and protesters physically attacked. Today on Speaking Out of Place we talk with student activists from two campuses who have achieved remarkable victories—student activists at the University of California, Davis, passed a measure that prevents any of the Associated Students, University of California, Davis (ASUDC)'s $20m budget from being used on companies named in the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement.  And students at Stanford staged the longest sit-in protest in Stanford’s history. The Sit In to Stop genocide occupied tents and staffed tables 24/7 for an unprecedented 120 nights and days, and at one point drew 500 people in the space of 4 hours to defend the encampment well until the early morning hours.We learn about these campaigns, the motivations behind them, and how activists will press forward.  

After the International Court of Justice's finding that Israel's war on Gaza was a "plausible case of genocide," Israel smeared the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, claiming that four or five UNRWA employees were affiliated with Hamas. These employees were fired without any proof of wrongdoing, and several countries stopping funding UNRWA, also without seeing any concrete evidence. Many of these countries are signatories of the Genocide Convention, which means they should be doing everything possible to stop Israel's acts of genocide. Instead, they are aiding and abetting genocide by cutting off desperately needed humanitarian aid.In this episode of Speaking Out of Place we collect statements from 27 leading activists and organizations from Kashmir, Indonesia, Ireland, the UK, the US, Canada, Australia, and elsewhere, including Ardi Imeis, a former legal counsel for UNRWA, former UN Special Rapporteurs on Palestine Richard Falk and Michael Lynk, Palestinian writers and activists Susan Albuhawa, Sherene Seikaly, Randa Abdel-Fattah, Lina Abojaradeh, Nasser Mashni and others, and legendary activist Angela Davis.In our Blog we list all the speakers and the time of their statement. We are also uploading the video on our YouTube channel

Today we speak with scholar Julie Norman about her book, The Palestinian Prisoners Movement: Resistance and Disobedience. She is joined in conversation by her colleague and collaborator Amahl Bishara. Based on extensive interviews with Palestinian prisoners, Norman’s study delineates in detail and depth the centrality of the movement in the broader Palestinian national struggle. Palestinian prisoners took back the prison space for organizing and resistance, developing an internal "counterorder" to challenge authorities. We talk about how the Palestinian prisoners movement was both intertwined with the Palestinian national movement, and yet also prefigured modes of liberation beyond it.Dr Julie Norman is an Associate Professor in Politics & International Relations at University College London (UCL), and a researcher/consultant on conflict, development, and political violence. She is also the Deputy Director of the UCL Centre on US Politics (CUSP), and a Senior Associate Fellow of International Security at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI).She is the author of five books and multiple articles on unarmed resistance, and she has published widely on conflict, activism, political prisoners, and political violence. She has worked as a practitioner with numerous NGOs in the Middle East and Africa, and she is a frequent commentator on the BBC, CNN, Al Jazeera, and other media outlets.Amahl Bishara is an associate professor of Anthropology, and of Studies of Race, Colonialism, and Diaspora at Tufts University.  Bishara’s research revolves around expression, space, media, and settler colonialism. Her first book, Back Stories: U.S. News Production and Palestinian Politics (Stanford University Press 2013) is an ethnography of production of US news during the second Palestinian Intifada. It asks what we can learn about journalism and popular political action when we place Palestinian journalists at the center of an inquiry about U.S. journalism.She is currently working on two book projects. One, addresses the relationship between Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinians in the West Bank, two groups that are positioned slightly differently in relation to Israeli settler-colonialism. Her second project examines Palestinian popular politics in a West Bank refugee camp.Bishara regularly writes for such outlets as Jadaliyya, Middle East Report. She also produced the documentary "Degrees of Incarceration" (2010), an hour-long documentary that explores how, with creativity and love, a Palestinian community responds to the crisis of political imprisonment. 

Today, on Speaking Out of Place, we discuss the recent International Court of Justice ruling on the Gaza genocide case, which found that Israel is plausibly engaging in genocide in Gaza.We discuss the case and its implications, as well as the colonial backdrop of the international law behind it, with former UN Special Rapporteur on Palestine Michael Link, Palestinian human rights attorney, scholar, activist, and teacher Noura Erakat, and Burmese scholar and dissident in exile, Maung Zarni. We also address the recent decision of a number of countries to defund the UN Relief Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, which was established by the United Nations in 1949. Finally, we talk about what global civil society can and must do to effect change where international law cannot.​​Noura Erakat is a human rights attorney and an Associate Professor at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  She is a Co-Editor of Jadaliyya. Her book, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press, 2019)  narrates the Palestinian struggle for freedom as told through the relationship between international law and politics during five critical junctures between 1917-2017 to better understand the emancipatory potential of law and to consider possible horizons for the future. Erakat’s research interests include human rights law, humanitarian law, refugee law, national security law, social justice, critical race theory, and  the Palestinian-Israel conflict. Until his retirement in December 2022, Michael Lynk taught labor law, constitutional law and international and Canadian human rights law at the Faculty of Law, Western University in London, Ontario for more than 20 years.From 2016 to 2022, he served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur for the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territory occupied since 1967. He has authored and edited several books, including most recently Protecting Human Rights in Occupied Palestine: Working Through the United Nations (Clarity Press, 2022), co-authored with Richard Falk and John Dugard, and International Law and the Middle East Conflict (Routledge, 2011), co-edited with Susan Akram, Michael Dumper and Iain Scobbie.Maung Zarni is a research fellow at the (Genocide) Documentation Center - Cambodia, co-founder of FORSEA.com, a progressive activist and intellectual platform for Southeast Asian activists, and Burmese coordinator of the Free Rohingya Coalition. He has 30-years of engagement in activism, scholarship, politics, and media.  An adviser to the Genocide Watch, Zarni served as a member of the Panel of Judges in the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Sri Lanka ('s) genocidal crimes against Eelam Tamil (2013) and was the initiator of the Permanent Peoples Tribunal on Myanmar (2017).His most recent monographs are “The Enemy of the State” speaks: Irreverent Essays and Interviews” (2019) and “Essays on Myanmar's Genocide of Rohingyas” (2018). With Uzbek-British filmmaker and war-correspondent Shahida Tulaganov, Zarni co-produced the 50-minutes educational film "Auschwitz: Lessons Never Learned" (2020) ( https://vimeo.com/469954700 ) and served as a leading expert in "EXILED: A film by Shahida Tulaganov (2017)", a historical documentary about the Rohingya genocide (https://exiledthefilm.com/) For his scholarship and activism, Zarni was recognized with the Cultivation of Harmony Award by the Parliament of the World’s Religions in 2015 and shortlisted for Sweden’s Right Livelihood Award in 2018.