Witnessing the Architecture of a Cancellation: The Silencing of Voices on Palestine in Austrian Academia

Abstract

This article analyzes the cancellation of a public lecture by Palestinian scholar, Walaa Alqaisiya, during a curatorial program at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in May 2022 due to false accusations of antisemitism in the context of anti-Palestinian racism in Austria. We speak of an ‘architecture’ because we analyze the questions of power, (in)visibility and erasure from the point of view of the public and institutional spaces, asking who can speak, about what and for whom, when? As a collective of former participants, we write from an implicated positionality that we call ‘participatory witnesses:’ the program ceased to be an abstract exploration of decolonial and queer/feminist perspectives, and transformed us affectively and politically, forcing us to critically respond to the censorship. We start by summarizing the unfolding of events and introducing the figure of the participatory witness and the concept of architecture. Then, we turn to Austrian academia’s climate of censorship of Palestinian perspectives. From this context, we analyze Alqaisiya’s cancellation through the prism of Euromodern Orientalist tropes, disciplinary strategies and civilizational discourses employed to continue the marginalization and exclusion of Palestinian perspectives. We pay particular attention to the significance of silencing queer Palestinian voices in the context of Israeli pinkwashing. Finally, we mnemonically map our attempts at navigating the architecture, negotiating between reclaiming public visibility for queer Palestinian perspectives and collective acts of refusal and delinking.