Palestine as Exception, Palestine As Norm: Critical Perspectives on Gaza from North America

The ongoing siege on Gaza has become a flashpoint for and a test of the convictions, analysis, and solidarity of social justice movements in North America. Racial justice, immigration, Indigenous, environmental, and LGBTQIATS spaces are being forced to confront the inextricable connections between their movements and Palestinians’ plight, as well as the risks that accompany steadfast public manifestations of solidarity against empire. The genocide in Palestine, ‘Ghassa’ The Lump in One’s Throat, requires us to interrogate how conditions within the imperial core are structured and maintained through war and invasion. This volume lays bare the intended and unintended aftereffects of framing the ongoing terror against Palestinians as “exceptional.” Palestine instead is a nexus that showcases the interlocking violent foundations of settler colonies that gift, sell, and loan killing technologies and the expertise to maximize their lethal effects. Recipients of these technologies in turn test, prototype, and export new modes of racialized subjection and dispossession. Even as the U.S and other so-called superpowers funnel these technologies and knowledge throughout the world, they pursue the building of militarized border walls to protect domestic interests (largely by keeping residents of the Global South out of or vulnerable to exploitation in the North). These terror exports and fortress architectures illuminate how settler colonies rely on and naturalize one another. They also expose the limits of liberal humanitarian logics – including progressive-to-radical proximity to the U.S. Democratic Party – in contexts of settler colonial violence.

This special issue on North America and its ties to the ongoing siege of Gaza will showcase alternative horizons for political struggle. We seek research articles, book and film reviews, poems, ethnographically-based commentary/ reflections, and other creative works that draw out the linkages between Palestine and other struggles produced by and waged within territories across Turtle Island and Anahuac. Areas of interest include but are not limited to:

  • The forms, practices, and aftereffects of the U.S.’s and other so-called “superpowers’”tentacles of their empires (McGranahan, Collins 2018)
  • How Palestine exposes the limits of liberal humanitarianism and scrambles other assumptions about the solidity of liberal principles in US and Canada
  • The revisiting of theories of prisons, surveillance, and the carceral state as they apply to and are challenged by Palestine
  • The inter/nationalism (Salaita 2016) of Palestinian and North American Indigenous sovereignty movements. And, networks of global settler solidarity and settler communities
  • The environmental impacts of settler colonial economies and warfare, and the lifeworlds built in landscapes of war and invasion (Masco 2017, Spice 2018)
  • The impact on Palestinian-American Diaspora Politics and connections to Palestine on North American electoral politics
  • The mundane and the spectacular in the violence of occupation/ siege
  • Thinking through Palestine as exception and Palestine as norm
  • Linkages between various state-sponsored conflicts, genocides, militarized borders, as well as between various “industrial complexes” such as the academy, military, and prisons
  • The complicity of North American Anthropology in forms of liberal empire and settler colonialism (c.f. Price 2016, Simpson 2017)
  • Palestine, anti-Zionism, and the state of leftist commitments to internationalism in North America
  • Settlements, border towns, and other modes of settler place-making

Please send 200-250 word abstracts to the Editorial Collective (Elizabeth Rubio, Xitlalli Alvarez Almendariz, and Denise Brennan) at anthronorthamerica@gmail.com by January 26th, 2024. Given the urgency of the ongoing violence, we plan to produce this issue faster than usual. By early February we will reach out to selected authors to submit their contributions for peer review. The deadline for these contributions is April 30th and revised – final – versions are due to the journal by July 31.