I entered academia with a certain level of naivete. During my undergraduate studies in Anthropology, I became energized by a discipline I felt was dedicated to knowledge production not for its own sake but as a project of building more just and liberated societies. Universities, by extension, seemed to be bastions of critical dialogue and action in pursuit of these goals. Over time, I realized this was not always true, as my experience in US academia has been marked by consistent, coordinated efforts to suppress the academic freedom of Palestinians and collaborations between US and Palestine-based academics.

In 2014, during my first semester of graduate school, Steven Salaita visited my university to speak about his recent firing from The University of Illinois: Urbana Champagne, allegedly for a series of Tweets he sent during Israel’s bombing of the besieged Gaza Strip. The bombing that summer killed more than 2,000 Palestinians. Salaita, a prolific scholar of settler-colonialism in the US and Palestine, offered a profoundly heartfelt and devastating commentary on the images and narratives out of Gaza he was exposed to at the time he sent the Tweets in question. He also offered thoughts about his personal stakes in Palestinian freedom and the ethics of fairness and criticality that shape his pedagogical and scholarly commitments. To the pro-Israel faculty in the audience, neither Salaita nor the Palestinian suffering he spoke about seemed important or even legible. The Q&A following the talk felt like a trial after the sentencing. One of the first questions was from a pro-Israel faculty member, who dismissively asked, “Do you apologize for what you did?”

The event brought into relief that Salaita was not fired for Tweets so much as for breaking two rules incessantly enforced in US academia. First, Palestinians can only be angry if they are also silent. Second, discussion and analysis of conditions of unfreedom must always remain abstract and separate from the conditions themselves and those living under them. These two rules are regularly deployed to silence and punish critical discussions about Palestine in US academic spaces. So often, when it comes to Palestinians, the subaltern, in fact, cannot speak.

Salaita’s visit was one of the first of many efforts I’ve witnessed or experienced meant to curtail academic freedom around Palestine. I was initially admitted into an anthropology graduate program intending to examine the intersections of tourism and transnational activism in the occupied West Bank. Thus, in the summer of 2015, I enrolled in an Arabic program at Birzeit University and intended to spend the summer conducting exploratory fieldwork. Obtaining IRB approval for preliminary fieldwork was made extremely difficult, as university administration questioned my qualifications for doing this research and eventually called me into an in-person meeting with the review board. My most engraved memory from that meeting was when a board member interrogatively asked me what Israeli state authorities would think about my research. I responded that I didn’t consider this a relevant question. Once again, academic workers had positioned themselves as protectors of the Israeli state at the expense of free inquiry that centers the lives of Palestinians living under settler-colonialism and apartheid.

That summer, I flew to Jordan and made my way to the Israeli-controlled King Hussein border crossing into the West Bank. After stating that I intend to study Arabic at Birzeit, I was held at the border alongside an elderly Palestinian man and some other non-Palestinians who had raised suspicions. We were guarded by teenagers scrolling through their phones and presumably sharing common youthful gossip with machine guns hanging at their sides. After six hours and a series of “interviews” asking me questions about my father’s name, my religion, and why I would study Arabic when I come from a Christian family, I was denied entry. Israeli authorities made up a law to justify my denial, saying that because I was going to study Arabic, I needed to apply for a student visa.

I was extremely eager to pursue language learning at such an important Palestinian institution while building a network of collaboration and exchange with Palestinian colleagues. However, the Israeli state actively works to render such partnerships impossible. The informal policy they used to justify my denial and that of so many others has recently been formalized with new regulations prohibiting international scholars from teaching and working in Palestine.

This policy is a boycott of individual academics meant to cut off Palestine and Palestinians from the rest of the world, deny them opportunities to participate in broader academic communities and prevent the spread of knowledge of Israel’s cruel system of settler-colonial apartheid. At the same time as I was denied entry, and every summer after that, dozens of US university programs offered students opportunities to participate in study abroad programs in Israel and at Israeli universities that perpetuate the invisibility of settler-colonial violence shaping the everyday lives and deaths of Palestinians.

Much of the current opposition erroneously frames the boycott as sanctioning individual Israeli scholars rather than the Israeli academic institutions directly complicit as an accessory to the apartheid reality. Opponents also claim the boycott is an attack on the mission of universities writ large as spaces of fierce critique and speaking truth to power. By sharing a small sample of my experiences, I aim to underline Alireza Doostdar’s ever-pertinent point that critics of the boycott assume that Israeli academics are our colleagues, whereas Palestinian academics are not. Given the vastly unequal treatment of Israeli and Palestinian academia, it is difficult to interpret opposition to the boycott as anything other than a rejection of academic freedom and the continuation of a world that treats Palestinians as exceptionally unworthy of benefiting from the values of critical and collaborative knowledge production US academic institutions and anthropologists in particular claim to hold so dearly.

Anti-Palestinian violence has only accelerated since I first entered academia. At the same time, I see solidarity with Palestinians and a recognition of their experiences as mirrored in global structures of colonial oppression as vastly more prominent among my generation of scholars than that of previous generations. These scholars understand the importance of rejecting the production of disinterested and extractive knowledge and instead apply critical and careful methods of inquiry as world-building tools. This point is essential not only to underscore that, as anthropologists, we can stand on the right side of history amidst a growing intersectional and international movement for Palestinian freedom. By rejecting the call from Palestinian civil society to support their struggle through boycotts, the AAA risks alienating upcoming generations of anthropologists that overwhelmingly acknowledge the importance of learning from and being led by those who bear the brunt of structures of oppression. This could have severe consequences for anthropology’s growth and perhaps survival as an innovative and relevant field of research.

Of course, I worry about what repercussions publicly supporting this vote might have on my prospects for academic jobs in a crumbling market. Academics who speak critically about Israel’s apartheid system are regularly targeted, harassed, fired, and denied opportunities, mainly when they are Palestinian or members of other marginalized groups. However, I don’t want to live in a world where my career was made possible through acquiescence to Palestinians’ unfreedom, academic or otherwise. For me to not stand with Palestine and my Palestinian mentors, peers, students, and the Palestinian refugees exiled in Jordan who allow me to do my research would be nothing short of academic malpractice.

This is why I’m voting “yes” to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Kyle B. Craig is a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology and Middle East and North African Studies at Northwestern University. His dissertation research examines the intersections of youth temporalities, the affective resonances of urban material, and the politics of public aesthetics via graffiti and street art in Amman, Jordan. 

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(1) end (finally) the narrative that museums and academic institutions are neutral.

Museums and academic institutions are not neutral. Instead, they are often rooted in inequality: the accumulation of material, money, physical space, and knowledge, along with alliances with other institutions that include the state. As Nathan Sentance argues, institutions that receive funds from the state are inherently political. Funding influences a range of aspects of the institution, eventually making its way into the content. Believing in the neutrality of these institutions also helps to preserve the dominant systems. When we do not take sides, we preserve the status quo.

During my tenure in academia and museums, including Dumbarton Oaks Research Library & Collection and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, I have encountered people who believe that such institutions are neutral. I remember one academic who wrote, referring to the colonization of the Americas, that its exploitative systems actually benefited a range of people. This commentary arrived in the form of an email as we were preparing to collaborate on a written piece. According to this academic, colonization created a variety of narratives that all need to be recognized, and we should avoid bias and subscribe to neutral language when we discuss this topic in the upcoming publication.

However, we need to be clear. Colonization creates a power imbalance. The colonization of the Americas—and specifically settler colonialism—fomented inequalities whose effects are still felt today. Today, the over-exploitation and destruction of land and water for industrial agriculture or for oil pipelines is the consequence of colonization. These actions not only disrespect Indigenous relationships with the environment but also inhibit access to food, clean water, and other resources, prioritizing profits over people and other living beings. As Angela Davis and Michelle Alexander have explained, today’s prison-industrial complex and mass incarceration are part of a continuum with the institution of slavery, which was a component of the settler colonial system on which the US was founded. If someone claims neutrality when it comes to discussing colonization, they then ignore the sufferings that people have experienced. They consequently perpetuate the very inequalities that colonization established. We should include the taking of archaeological materials—which for some peoples may be the taking of memories, and the taking of living beings—as part of the inequalities that colonization created.

In another instance, a museum staff member related to me that they gave a presentation that referred to Christopher Columbus. In spite of an admonition by an audience member after their talk, the speaker stood by their desire to portray Columbus in a neutral light. After all, they noted, they are an academic and need to present information that is free from bias. Again, keeping neutral about Columbus perpetuates the oppression that he enacted. The academic could have issued an overt opinion or, at a minimum, shared information about the atrocities Columbus committed and led against Indigenous peoples. Presenting information could also serve a role in creating a more holistic and honest picture of past or present situations. As I will discuss in an upcoming post, I often encountered discouragement from including certain types of information about objects and their histories, and omitting this would have, I believed, de-politicized the objects. I would caution, though, that sensitivity is required here. The person speaking should, of course, be aware of their audience and provide warnings as needed before assuming that people will want to hear or be reminded of these atrocities. There needs to be awareness and balance, but confidence that, even as an academic, you do have an opinion and a responsibility to challenge narratives and to cultivate mindsets. At the same time, I would encourage people to “share the air,” to know when to speak and when to listen, and recognize the expertise of people and communities beyond the museum. As Mike Murawski has written, efforts to share power and to challenge neutrality are parts of disrupting white supremacy. Murawski and La Tanya Autry created the #MuseumsAreNotNeutral Campaign in 2017.

Of course, there are institutions and people within them that have been challenging hegemonic narratives. On January 20, 2017, the day of the Trump inauguration, the Queens Museum, under its former director Laura Raicovich, shut down to create a space where people could make protest materials. This meant that business did not carry on as usual. The decision by the Queens Museum to create such a space meant that the museum became an (even more) active site for challenging oppressive politics. We need to envision our museums as spaces that take timely action, where we can gather, plan, and create. In some cases, external groups use the site of the museum as a focal point to challenge its practices while also serving as a gathering space and a creative space. This is the case of the “nine weeks of art and action” against the Whitney Museum, where organizers challenged the presence of Warren Kanders on the Whitney’s board. Kanders’ company Safariland produces tear gas used against people worldwide, from Ferguson to Palestine. In other cases, the institution takes on more agency in designing the action and using the space. The Interference Archive in Brooklyn, which hosts exhibitions and maintains a rich archive of zines, also held propaganda parties in 2017, building up to the inauguration. It is especially poignant and inspiring to see institutions that house art and historical materials serving as a locus for creating new art, which is then seen in the streets or among other sites of action and resistance. Especially in cities like New York where space is constricted and heavily commodified, museums can use their space for mobilizing people and even furnishing people with artistic inspiration by sharing the works they house. It is unfortunate, though, that this action among others at the Queens Museum may have led to conflict with the Museum’s board and Raicovich’s departure in early 2018.

Even if an institution is not capable of undertaking a cohesive stance—shutting down in protest—without repercussions for its staff, there is also the daily performance of neutrality that needs to be challenged. This daily performance may be exercised on the level of an informal conversation between colleagues or on the level of a staff meeting. I would encourage staff to ask, how am I using the power or privilege that I have to interrupt dominant narratives and to create a more just society? I would encourage institutional leadership to ask, how am I interrupting these narratives and creating safer spaces where my staff can express their opinions and advocate change without concern over retaliation?

Bryan Cockrell

Bryan Cockrell is an English as a New Language Teacher at KAPPA International High School in the Bronx, NY. He is a settler living on Lenape territories. His prior work was in the metallurgy of Central and South America and archaeometry.

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Quietly float.

Unobtrusively float.

Since 9/11, I could no longer float with a voice.

And so I left it to those who were too young to know what it meant to have that voice stripped and to be disappeared. And I watched as it became clear that if we critique the state, we are made to be at fault by the state, no matter how relevant our critique is.

And so I was quiet, my eyes dry, and determined to float.

Thoughtfully float.

Rigorously float.

When people asked me what I thought about what happened in New Zealand, I said the links between settler colonialism and white supremacy are deep and will only erupt in erasure of racialized others because constitutive to these states is such violence.

And they said, we’re talking about Islamophobia. To which I responded, so am I.

One floats without tears and without protest and some of us only allow ourselves to float as an academic with reason.

Intellectual reason.

Disciplinary reason.

And then I saw Hassan Ghani’s twitter post:

Members of Māori community perform #Haka in tribute to those murdered in #Christchurch. pic.twitter.com/YjhqdWtSHx

— Hassan Ghani (@hassan_ghani) March 17, 2019

And I cried. In these bodies, I saw the emotion and strength with the land, and how people I do not know, extended a fierce sense of solidarity, and in their movement, my tears were allowed to flow and found a place. I wanted to find out more about who these men were, websites claimed them as “biker gangs,” and then I found Robbie Shilliam’s response:

These are not random maori. Nor a “biker gang”. They are Mangu Kaha – the Black Power. There is a specific history which makes sense of their solidarity here. https://t.co/N8PE4KdQ2O https://t.co/QYdovaY9ym

— Robbie Shilliam (@RobbieShilliam) March 17, 2019

I realized that in their movement was a lesson of how to hold, center, and be in the face of erasure. It was a lesson of how to live in world.

In Robbie Shilliam’s tweet is also a link to his article, ‘The Polynesian Panthers and The Black Power Gang: Surviving Racism and Colonialism in Aotearoa New Zealand.’ This chapter links the histories of racism and colonialism by pointing to the global significance of settler colonialism for the further study of black power. Shilliam’s chapter moves through the history of settler colonialism and its impact on New Zealand, specifically indigenous communities through the violence of assimilation and labor. Perhaps most importantly, Shilliam talks through the links between settler colonialism and continued discrimination against racialized others:

Under settler colonialism, the dispossession of land from indigenous peoples and its genocidal effect exists prior to and parallel to the exploitation of peoples based on racial exclusion from and discrimination within the civic sphere. This means that in most societies born from settler colonialism there exists distinct – albeit intimately related – sedimentations of land dispossession and labour exploitation that form the uneven ground of white supremacist rule in thought and practice. (pg 2)

I thought about the video, and the ways by which the Mangu Kaha came, full of emotion, intentional movement, and made explicit the knowledge of how such violence has linked our bodies. There was something fierce about this emotion, something powerful, and something about how they held space for tears and love. The Mangu Kaha brought back together the dispersed, disposed of, and assimilated social contract that holds us all together through love for others. As Shilliam points out in the section on ‘Black Power as Family Survival’:

No where was this effect more concentrated than in the breaking up of the extended family organization (whanau) and the dissolution of its cardinal ethics of care (manaaki), compassion (aroha), and relational reciprocity (whanaungatanga). In the early 1970s Hana Jackson, a Māori activist, summed up this effect of urbanization and assimilation passionately and acutely: “you are killing the basic human nature of the people – love for others.” (pg. 13)

And I felt, through their movement, the love and honor for those who were killed in their sanctuary. The Mangu Kaha built solidarity and respect between communities that have been pitted against one another, and there is power in that connection.

Many immigrant communities are told by authorized discourses of the state that the Mangu Kaha are “criminals.” As immigrants struggle to assimilate and find themselves on new landscapes, the production of ignorance around indigenous communities reinstates narratives in the service of the state. This complicates a simple story of solidarity. I can only imagine what sorts of negotiations of being and belonging might be taking place within those communities as there is a recognition of similar treatment across different histories… and a recognition of self in other.

When faced with a crisis, my instinct is to go to sayings my grandmother may have told me. It’s been so many years of my doing that, so many years since she has left us, that I can no longer remember if these are her words or mine, or maybe her mothers, or maybe my mothers. It seems relevant, but not really, because in such forgetting, I recognize how wisdom is a layering of many memories, a meshing of different modes of knowing, and weaving generations of experience.

This is not me claiming to be wise, just me claiming to recognize the process.

She said/I said/we said, accumulating experiences is not what it’s about, it’s about how you hold and care for them (sambhalou – to care for), and how one does that determines how we understand what is happening. I did not need to accumulate more experiences, more images, more likes, more, more, more… but I needed to know what to do with whatever arrived at my threshold (chaukat). Last week, I spent a lot of time thinking of my grandmother and other matriarchs of my family who have recently passed — all with their own ways of holding, centering and being.  And each one of these women, immigrants moving through spaces of violence in search of whatever home could mean, creating homes for all of us, and leaving within us senses of home as they pass.

I was holding all of this yesterday as I walked into Ishara Art Foundation‘s inaugural show, Altered Inheritances: Home is a Foreign Place, which brought together works by Indian artists, Shipa Gupta and Zarina Hashimi. Although these works and shows (as titles) had been seen before, there was something about how they were held and centered in this space that, as Yaminay Chaudhri said, left us trembling. Bumping into the Artistic Director, Nada Raza at the show, I was breathless from emotion as I congratulated her. “The show curated itself,” she said, referring to the fact that the works and title itself emerged through bringing together both women’s cohesive bodies of work.  A show like this, however, is a beautiful example of when curating is not just about accumulation, but rather how aesthetics, experience, histories, senses of home are held and centered. The works themselves critically, mathematically, architecturally, poetically, politically, and emotionally held, centered and became a way to engage with how we belong.

home is of course here—and always a missed land.
–Land, Agha Shahid Ali

The poignancy of how this show began with Agha Shahid Ali‘s poetry was not lost. Shahid, a poet from Kashmir, yet another home – land split through the violence of the nation state, and its lines. A show featuring two Indian women, brought together by a Pakistani curator, starting off with a line from a Kashmiri poet — perhaps this is only possible in Dubai — for as long as none of them claim belonging to the Emirates. The sheer contingency of belonging, the terror of trying, the violence of it being stripped away, the fractured nature of being — all of it was on display as we walked through narratives of migration, lines across landscapes as territory, and the ways by which embodied senses of being and belonging emerged through the violence of the nation state.

The gallery became the homespace, the nationspace, and …space. I was caught in one of  Hashimi’s piece: a mass of stars, the constellations, the immense-ness that one can see when one looks up on a dark night from a courtyard, and I thought of the speculative and her capacity to make us dream beyond what is right in front of us. And then how she grounds us, in this case, with her caption Sitarou Say Agay Jahan Aur Bhi Hai — a famous line from Allama Iqbal’s poetry which I translate to “There are more worlds beyond the stars.”

It is difficult to articulate the very fine line that Hashimi is treading here — it is simultaneously the recognition of utopia and dreamings of different kinds of future that Iqbal was alluding to in a pre-Partition (pre-1947) moment, while also drawing attention to how those dreams are what has led to violence and trauma in the nation state. It draws attention to how we have yet to dismantle the pain and suffering of the colonial state and how in this moment, we continue to replicate that same violence, exemplified by Gupta’s work in the show.

I left the show overwhelmed and a bit teary eyed. My visit and encounter with the work did not provide answers, but it did remind me of a larger context within which to hold and care for the trauma of knowing that a white supremacist could walk into a masjid and open fire on Jumma prayers. It gave me strength to pick up that information and feel the heft of knowing that he filmed it and put it on line to demonstrate to others how easy such a taking of life is, and it reminded me that when the world begins to hurt, we need to come together to take us beyond the information to the core of emotion — and I knew that as I moved into that space, I had the space to cry, and dream of different futures. And so, without any real answers, I, alongside others, will be with, hold and center the memory of the over 50 killed and 50 wounded in Christchurch, New Zealand. May you all rest in power and peace.

Uzma Z. Rizvi

Uzma Z. Rizvi is an associate professor of Anthropology and Urban Studies at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn NY, and a Visiting Scholar at Shah Abdul Latif University, Khairpur, Pakistan. Her current work focuses on Ancient Pakistan and UAE, during the third millennium BCE. She utilizes poetics as a mode through which to push the limits of archaeological theory. Additionally, her research focuses on ancient subjectivity, intimate architecture; memory, war, and trauma in relationship to the urban fabric, critical heritage studies at the intersections of contemporary art and history, and finally, epistemological critiques of the discipline in the service of decolonization.
Previous posts can be accessed via https://savageminds.org/author/uzma/

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