Connected Histories of Palestinian Liberation: Gender, Race and Class in the Anticolonial Imagination

From the 1960s to the 1980s, the Palestinian national liberation movement emerged as a key site of struggle and solidarity within the global anticolonial imagination. Movements from across the world offered their moral and material support to the Palestinian cause, and the Palestinian movement itself strategised and creatively inserted itself into a broader political project for decolonisation, self-determination and liberation. Recent work on the connected histories of this political project have challenged the narrative of its inevitable transition into neoliberal state building, demonstrated the richness of Palestinian engagement across multiple spheres and geographies of interaction, and highlighted the necessity for the continuation of the anticolonial struggle. In spite of this, there remain significant gaps in our knowledge of the multiple revolutionary positions that constituted this global landscape.

The workshop aims to reconnect the distinct yet overlapping categories of mobilisation and analysis that shaped interactions between the Palestinian movement and the world, by looking to discourses and lived experiences of gender, race and class as key points of struggle, unity, and transgression. In tracing the multiple positions that connected Palestine to the broader anticolonial project, the workshop seeks to retrieve voices and practices often hidden by the dominant frameworks through which these histories are delimited. By taking a transnational lens, we can challenge the established political-geographical imaginaries that dominate scholarship on Palestine, instead highlighting the exchange and translation of ideas and practices across territorial borders and socio-cultural boundaries. In doing so, we aim to reconsider the global history of anticolonial struggle and solidarity, and its afterlives for thinking towards a relational politics of liberation with Palestine today.

The half-day workshop, hostedby the Entangled Histories of Palestine and the Global New Left research project at Roskilde University,will be held online in the last week of February (TBC). Those working with the categories of gender, race and class either from a Palestinian movement perspective or from the perspective of engagements with the Palestinian cause in this period are called to submit an abstract of max 300 words by 30 November 2020. Abstracts are encouraged that seek to uncover the relations between these categories and how they interact to shape anticolonial liberation practices and global imaginations.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

• Intellectual Strands of Solidarity: tricontinentalism, Afro-Asianism, pan-Arabism, Marxism-Leninism, black radicalism, Maoism, Third World feminism, the global New Left
• Landmark Meetings & Moments: 1966 Tricontinental Conference (Havana), 1969Pan-African Cultural Festival (Algiers), 1970 World Conference on Palestine (Amman), 1975 Zionism as Racism declaration (UN), 1975 World Conference on Women (Mexico City)
• Mobilisation & Organisation: General Union of Palestinian Women, Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions, international solidarity movements, student revolts
• Exchange & Translation: political education, cultural production, travelling theory, travelling revolutionaries
• Rupture & Continuity: scattered archives, intergenerational learning, nostalgia, usable pasts

Those invited to attend will prepare a paper for discussion that will be circulated in advance. Alongside paper presentations, we will engage in thematic discussions. Attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to a special issue publication that we intend will emerge from the workshop. Please submit abstracts or any further enquiries to Sorcha Thomson at samt@ruc.dk.