Studying the Connections Between the U.S. South and the Global South https://ift.tt/GdWlrge
This past fall, I taught a class about public memory in one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the United States. In October, when Hamas retaliated against the state of Israel, the Palestinian genocide became impossible to ignore. Students in my class hesitated to talk about this topic, even when directly engaging with texts written by Palestinian American refugees. A few of my Jewish students missed more classes than usual, telling me they were overwhelmed and stressed. Muslim students experienced heightened anxiety both on and off campus. Anti-war and anti-genocide teach-ins were hosted on my campus, many led by dear friends of mine. Tensions were high.
Through these encounters, I realized just how little I knew about the Israel-Palestine conflict, which has been raging on and off for decades. I also realized just how little I knew about the overlap between the Israel-Palestine war and other acts of violent war efforts supported by the United States: Vietnam, North Korea, and Cuba, for instance. Lastly, I understood how little I had reflected on the overlaps between the U.S. South and the Global South, including Palestine. While the U.S. South is firmly located in the Global North, with the political and financial power that entails, understanding the ‘South’ only in a U.S. context leaves a lot out.
Many of those in the U.S. South — Indigenous peoples, immigrants of color, Black, Brown, and other oppressed peoples — share commonalities with those in the Global South. Matthew Pratt Guterl, an American Studies professor at Brown University, has written that the “South” is not “contained by national borders” any more than the Mason-Dixon Line contains it and that “polylingual, transnational, and economic connections to a ‘global South’ running from Southeast Asia to Africa to Latin America” permeate the U.S. today. I, like Guterl, believe that to restrict a discussion of the ‘South’ to such strict geographical and ideological boundaries “is to reproduce this same system of advantage, ignoring more than half of the world’s population who actually live south” globally, not just in the U.S. context.
To be clear, I don’t want to downplay losses on either side of the current conflict between Palestine and Israel, but rather highlight the structural issues at hand: settler states who occupy Indigenous lands; powerful settler and western states waging an ongoing war against subaltern southern states. And so I offer you a non-exhaustive list of resources that have helped me begin to make sense of this most recent act of colonial violence.
A groundbreaking critique of the West’s historical, cultural, and political perceptions of the East that is — three decades after its first publication — one of the most important books written about our divided world.
With the rigorous scholarship he brought to his influential Orientalism and an exile’s passion (he is Palestinian by birth), Edward W. Said traces the fatal collision between two peoples in the Middle East and its repercussions in the lives of both the occupier and the occupied — as well as in the conscience of the West.
According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian studies and American Indian studies have more in common than one may think. In Inter/Nationalism, Salaita argues that American Indian and Indigenous studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism focusing on Palestine.
A landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history, the first general account of the conflict told from an explicitly Palestinian perspective.
Translated into English for the first time after its publication in 1967, Ghassan Kanafani’s On Zionist Literature makes an incisive analysis of the literary fiction written in support of the Zionist colonization of Palestine.
Gate of the Sun is a Palestinian Odyssey and the first magnum opus of the Palestinian saga. Beautifully weaving together haunting stories of survival and loss, love and devastation, memory, and dream, Khoury humanizes the complex Palestinian struggle as he brings the story of an entire people to life.
Barred from his homeland after 1967’s Six-Day War, the poet Mourid Barghouti spent thirty years in exile — shuttling among the world’s cities, yet secure in none of them, separated from his family for years at a time, never certain whether he was a visitor, a refugee, a citizen, or a guest. As he returns home for the first time since the Israeli occupation, Barghouti crosses a wooden bridge over the Jordan River into Ramallah and is unable to recognize the city of his youth. Sifting through memories of the old Palestine as they come up against what he now encounters in this mere “idea of Palestine,” he discovers what it means to be deprived not only of a homeland but of “the habitual place and status of a person.”
Based on several months of research and an extended visit to the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the early 1990s (where he conducted over 100 interviews with Palestinians and Jews), Palestine was the first significant comics work of political and historical nonfiction by Sacco, whose name has since become synonymous with this graphic form of New Journalism.
UpSet Press has restored to print Suheir Hammad’s first book of poems, Born Palestinian, Born Black, originally published by Harlem River Press in 1996. The new edition is augmented with a new author’s preface and new poems under the heading, The Gaza Suite, as well as a new publisher’s note by Zohra Saed, an introduction by Marco Villalobos, and an afterword by Kazim Ali.
Fady Joudah’s The Earth in the Attic is the 2007 Yale Series of Younger Poets competition winner. In his poems, Joudah explores big themes — identity, war, religion, what we hold in common — while never losing sight of the quotidian, the specific.
Mahmoud Darwish is a literary rarity: at once critically acclaimed as one of the most important poets in the Arabic language and beloved as the voice of his people. A legend in Palestine, his lyrics are sung by fieldworkers and schoolchildren. He has assimilated some of the world’s oldest literary traditions while simultaneously struggling to open new possibilities for poetry. This collection spans Darwish’s entire career, nearly four decades, revealing an impressive range of expression and form.
A reading list with further suggestions, organized into different genres. There are also other resources about the Palestine-Israel conflict located on this website.
This is the text of a talk that Neferti Tadiar delivered as part of a round-table discussion at Columbia University. She is a Barnard College Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and, among her many activists, is one of the co-founders of the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine on her campus.
Film and Other Media
Mo, created by Mohammed Amer, Ramy Youssef (2022)
Mo Najjar straddles the line between two cultures, three languages, and a ton of foolishness as a Palestinian refugee constantly living one step away from asylum on the path to U.S. citizenship. Available with a paid subscription on Netflix.
This debut feature film by journalist Abby Martin began while reporting in Palestine, where she was denied entry into Gaza by the Israeli government on the accusation she was a “propagandist.” So, Abby connected with a team of journalists in Gaza to produce the film through the blockaded border. It is a documentary about the historic Great March Of Return protests, which occurred every week from March 2018 until December 2019 but covers so much more.
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