Since the 1990s, as scholars in the social sciences have noted, studies of Palestine have undergone a “global turn” (Collins 2011), moving away from treating its history, cultures, and politics as exceptional from dominant analytical frameworks and case studies. This turn arrived at a juncture worth considering: it coincides with both the institutionalization of Postcolonial Studies in the United States academy as well as with the ascendance of settler colonialism as the dominant frame for understanding Palestinian dispossession. Despite these conjunctures, as well as the prominent place of Palestinian American scholar Edward Said within the field, Palestine and Palestinian literature in particular have received uneven treatment within Postcolonial Studies–often shying away from confronting Palestine’s dispossession or employing conceptual paradigms developed by Palestinian scholars (including “Orientalism” and “resistance literature,” to name two notable examples) without retaining an analysis of the context from which those concepts emerged. At the same time, an exceptional host of political thinkers whose work centers Palestinian life, including Raja Shehadeh, Eyal Weizman, Derek Gregory, and Jasbir Puar, have worked to retrain our collective, averted gaze back to the Nakba of 1948 as a fundamental twentieth-century imperial event while asking what it might mean to live in a “colonial present” (Gregory 2004).

This panel seeks to understand this history as well as to posit productive avenues for future study of Palestine within, against, or alongside postcolonial studies. Given that postcolonial studies’ operational centers remain within Anglo-American universities, often with deep financial and cultural ties to Israel, what would it mean to center Palestine in postcolonial studies in a meaningful way, in both our scholarship and in the classroom? This panel of international scholars takes up this question not merely as a speculative thought experiment, but as a practical matter of scholarly labor and pedagogy. It brings together scholars and teachers of Arabic and Palestinian literatures on the one hand with scholars working with postcolonial studies on the other, to think through these questions. As a collaboration between the LLC Arabic Forum and the TC Postcolonial Studies Forum, we hope that the session will attract an audience with a broad range of perspectives and field investments.

We begin with a paper by Muhsin al-Musawi, author (among other relevant works) of The Postcolonial Arabic Novel: Debating Ambivalence (2003), and who will present “Missing Palestine in Postcolonial ‘Theory’!” tracing this lacunae in postcolonial studies and connecting it to recent attempts to censor Palestinian authors in the public sphere. Kevin Potter, scholar of English and American Studies and author of Poetics of the Migrant: Migrant Literature and the Politics of Motion (2023) will then explore this question in an institutional register in a paper entitled “Palestinian Absence and the Specter of Capital.” He will argue that the marginalization of Palestine is symptomatic of a larger retreat from radical politics from within postcolonial studies and is tied to the casualization of academic labor as well as to the institutional pressures that require courting grants and achieving prestige in order to ensure viability in an increasingly precarious market. The last two papers concentrate on the classroom as a site of disciplinary inquiry: Cynthia Juyoung Ok, poet (Ward Toward, 2024) and professor of creative writing, will present “Palestine as Palestine,” in which she argues that Palestinian literature is often taught and contextualized in the U.S. American classroom in ways that normalize Palestinian dispossession. Her talk gives practical suggestions for resisting these normalizing patterns, leading to questions about what level and kind of historical context is crucial to the texts while studying the craft of Palestinian writing, and what indigenous Palestinian teaching practices can reorient literature pedagogy at large. Lastly, Andrew Gorin, scholar of English and Media Studies, will present “Postcolonialism by Proxy in the Arab-Israeli Classroom,” allowing us to think through our common question with Palestinian students of postcolonial studies in mind. Gorin explores the pedagogical practice of indirectly representing Israel’s oppression of Palestinians through discussion of decolonial struggles that unfolded outside of the Middle East (i.e. through discussion of the Black Nationalism and the Black Arts Movement). He ends our panel by representing the actual insights of Palestinian students with Israeli citizenship alongside his own reflections on postcolonial approaches to working with them during the wake of the October 7th attack and Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza. We will close with a response from Anthony Alessandrini (Frantz Fanon and the Future of Cultural Politics, 2016 and Decolonize Multiculturalism, 2022) that gathers these discursive threads to reflect on the future of Palestine studies.