My paper argues that the subversive actions undertaken by both Black and Palestinian prisoners against the prison system in the 1960s and 70s were key in constructing the Black-Palestinian solidarity popularized around that time. The larger research questions from which I seek to depart are: How does our conception of the Black-Palestinian solidarity of the 1960s/70s--and the solidarity of today--change if we look at how Black and Palestinian prisoners were exploring modalities of liberation inside of prison? What can looking at abolitionist Black feminist literature teach us about prisoner experiences and their contributions to social justice praxis? This paper explores how frameworks in American Studies can help examine the experiences, interactions, geographies and education of these prisoners in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the epistemological and ontological thrust behind Black-Palestinian solidarity. Palestinian examinations into the meaning of the prison have been centered in critical ethnographic research, but my paper seeks to expand their theoretical importance to construct a larger genealogy of resistance. I bring together the work of Palestinian scholars such as Ismail Nashif and Nahla Abdo-Zubi with the work of North American Black feminist scholars such as Angela Davis, Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Katherine McKittrick to better understand how the knowledge production and actions of Black and Palestinian prisoners theoretically and practically helped to construct the solidarity. My interventions specifically encourage us to look at alternative geographies through the unseen corporeal contributions to social justice praxis rooted in prisoners’ bodies. By weaving together both Middle East Studies and Critical Black Studies, our understanding of the role of those in the “margins,” like those in the Palestinian and Black community, is internationalized and expanded. Prisons no longer become sites specific to their geographic location, but become test labs for internationalist resistance and are highlighted as critical spaces of theorization.

This paper examines the process of financialized-urbanization in the West Bank as form of colonial biopolitics that presupposes further dispossession. The paper bridges frameworks from American Studies and Critical Geography to analyze the processes of urbanization and the recent push for mortgages in the West Bank within the long duree of settler colonial dispossession and capitalist expansion. The paper rejects the boundaries of methodological nationalism and deploys a genealogical method, situating the colonization of Palestine within the variegated trajectories empire. Thus, the paper traces technologies of dispossession and confinement (mortgage) to their colonial origins to draw out the continuities of settler colonial relations embedded within contemporary real estate development. The paper draws from a vast history that spans the development of the mortgage during the 12th century, British colonization of Turtle Island, Indian allotment, and the legacy of land tenure in Hawai’i. By examining housing’s role in the massive expansion of debt in the West Bank over the previous decade, the paper asks to what extent this financialized-urbanization is tied to Israel’s larger settler colonial project, using debt as a mechanism of control and dispossession. This paper uses Palestine as an entry to understand how biopolitics functions as a modality of the settler colonial logic of elimination. In 2008, the Palestinian National Authority implemented an Affordable Housing program, coupled with the creation of a mortgage facility that targeted low and middle-income families. As a form of colonial biopolitics, the process of urbanization and the shift to pre-fabricated single family units - as opposed to incremental building - fundamentally changed the way Palestinians relate to land - through new land tenure systems- and most importantly each other - through credit relations. The West Bank demonstrates the convergences of these forces providing an opportunity to examine the intersections and departures between the logic of elimination, biopower, and the logics of capital. Housing is not only a site of research, but rather a network of institutions that converge to manage contemporary social and political life. I frame the developments in Palestine as a co-constitutive project between the US and Israel, wherein both colonies exchange knowledges and technologies of repression, making Palestine a crucial site to theorize the persistence of settler colonial practices in the US. While this paper builds on histories of conquest in North America, this paper will likewise seek to place Palestine within dominant discourses of settler colonialism in American Studies.

This paper looks at Palestine as a site to configure the relationship between settler colonialism, racialization, and reproductive politics. Rather than relegating reproduction with the maternal body, this paper draws on feminist and anti-racist scholars from Ethnic Studies/American Studies, who argue that discourses of reproduction have contributed to larger structures of racism, nation-building and imperial expansion. In this paper, I ask: How does reproductive politics become a site to think about broader politics of the state’s management of life and death, and how does that enable to understand the production of racial categories in Israel and Palestine. What would it mean to conceive of Israeli state projects of regulating women’s reproductive bodies as racial products that seek to exert power and sovereignty through this management of life and death? I bring together conversations from Palestine and Middle East Studies, Cultural Studies, and Black Studies, particularly, Black feminist theoretical frameworks and methodologies, to think about race/reproduction as a co-constitutive process that enables formations of race and nation. The issue of national reproduction in Israel – both in its terms of its ideological boundaries and in terms of the reproduction of its membership – has always been at the center of Zionist discourse. Previous scholarship on reproduction in Israel focuses on the technologization of reproduction as Israeli “pronatalism” (Kahn 2010; Vertommen 2015); the targeting of Palestinian women’s bodies/sexualities as a function of Israeli settler colonialism (Shalhoub-Kevorkian 2014); and Palestinian reproductive practices (Kanaaneh 2002). However, these have often been understood through theorizations of settler colonialism, in ways that solidify a native-settler binary, rather than how reproductive control by the State helps to structure relationship with other racialized subjects, including Yemeni, Ethiopian, and Ashkenazi Israeli women. By bringing in critical frameworks from Ethnic Studies, this paper will demonstrate how histories of reproductive control against black, native, and women of color in the US and abroad, are crucial frameworks to understand reproductive politics in Israel as bound up with racialization, nation-building and imperial expansion. Likewise, this paper will also demonstrate how reproductive politics in Israel and Palestine can expand Ethnic Studies’ goals of understanding racial and colonial formations in a transnational setting.

How does a Palestinian-specific ethnographic practice offer new departure points and considerations for other ethnographic practices rooted in an anti/decolonial ethos? Theories, methods and ideas that have emerged from the field of Ethnic Studies have naturally appealed to Palestinian scholars interested in producing research relevant for political transformation. In recent years, Ethnic Studies as a field has institutionally taken up solidarity with Palestine more fervently and offered many Palestinian scholars a site of intellectual and administrative refuge as we whether the storm of Zionist disciplining in other fields of study. But what then does a Palestinian ethnographic and methodological practice offer to the community of vibrant thinkers within Ethnic Studies whom we have tapped on for solidarity, looked to for anti/decolonial inspiration, and relied on for affective support while we, our scholarship and communities endure persistent crisis? This paper examines the methodological and theoretical opportunities made possible for Ethnic Studies by conducting ethnographic research from transnational Palestinian youth organizing perspectives. I specifically examine ways an ethnographic practice informed by transnational Palestinian youth epistemologies creates new understandings of the relationship between siege and exile, the boundaries of discipline and territory, and researcher and research subject. I shed light on the methodological importance of learning to think and write through movement, crisis, grief, and insecurity when producing research relevant for Palestinian liberation.