Thinking Palestine, Decolonization and Abolition in Ethnic Studies

Abstract

What does it mean to produce and engage in liberatory scholarship and teaching pedagogy on Palestine, given the extant forms of policing, surveillance and censorship that continue to target scholars of Palestine within the US academy? Why do these forms of repression appear even within a field of study—ethnic studies—that grew from emancipatory radical student movements seeking to dismantle (settler) colonial and white-supremacist hegemony in scholarship and teaching pedagogy? And how might we, as scholars engaged in the radical work and theory of abolition and decolonization, protect the field of ethnic studies from a mutilation of the pedagogical structure that such repression seeks to accomplish? To be clear about these terms, by abolition, I mean the insurgent praxis of Black rebellion that sought to abolish not only the system of but the foundational logics of racial-chattel-slavery. This insurgent praxis was not only sustained but renewed following the passage of the 13th amendment which abolished slavery except for as a punishment for crime. Since then, abolition continues to forcefully recreate itself as an ethos, school of thought, praxis, and movement, that redefines Blackness, and Black being against white-supremacist state violence codified in multiple liberal and neoliberal reconfigurations. In the contemporary moment abolitionist praxis seeks a dismantlement of the prison-industrial-complex and carceral logic that animates racist-state violence: policing, extrajudicial killing, racial surveillance and captivity of Black bodies (Browne 2015). But abolition also allows for and invites rebellion among all those whose lives are threatened by the white-being character of the state and its carceral logic and structure as well. This carceral logic extends to structures of regulated exclusion, taking form for example in the erection of carceral borders and border regimes to keep refugees and migrants out or contained, and the counter-insurgent war against knowledge curators, artists, and activists that question the fundamental coloniality and whiteness of the US state. I recognize true decolonization as that which has always been an abolitionist worldview and practice as well. Decolonization seeks not only to undue structures and ideologies of coloniality but to foreground Indigenous ways of being, knowing, and understanding in its place. When I refer to decolonization however, I am not referring only to an epistemic, psychological, or discursive project—I quite literally believe in the rematriation of stolen Indigenous lands to its stewards. By speaking and practising decolonization within, to, and against the academy and university, I am concerned with how our work within this space enables this rematriation. Within this framework, I offer this review of Sherene Razack’s Nothing Has to Make Sense (2022), Saree Makdisi’s Tolerance is a Wasteland (2022) and Lara Sheehi and Stephen Sheehi’s Psychoanalysis Under Occupation (2022) to explore partial causality for the institutionalized repression and absence of Palestinian studies within the field of ethnic studies as an institutional project. I propose that these three texts, when read in conversation with one another and alongside the rich tradition of decolonial and abolitionist thought and practice, offer important insights relevant to protecting the radical potential of the ethnic studies project from Zionist liberal co-optation.