The Wreck Itself
Between Palestine and American Indian Studies’ Sovereignty and the Surreal
Maryam Kashani
The wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth.
—Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck”
Like this three-story building on Nevada Street
engulfed by silence but for the lone scratchings of Squirrel,
scavenging after the fire to build her den
because it looks like it might be a long winter.
—Jenny L. Davis, “The (American) Indian (Studies) Removal Act of 2014”
Cacti continue to mark the boundaries of villages, often overgrown with bushes, thorns, and weeds. Palm, mulberry, fig, almond, pomegranate, and olive trees still provide shade, bear fruit, and go dormant in their annual cycles. Grasses are tall and cumbersome, yet the masked figures maneuver through and dive into them, taking in the view, living in the time of the ruins and the wrecks (Figure 1). There is a red-penciled sketch labeled “Kufur Birim” with the backs of two figures, one with a bun atop their head, the other wearing a backpack, framed by a tree and a flowering bush.
Figure 1. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2018. Video still from installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The videos, screenshots, and sketches on the walls depict the recent practices of young Palestinians who are returning to the ruins of the Nakba, the 1948 catastrophe in which Zionist settler colonial forces created more than seven hundred thousand Palestinian refugees, murdered over thirteen thousand, and destroyed over four hundred villages—through physical destruction, forced removal of their inhabitants, or the Israeli refusal of their return. Palestinian artists Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas began returning to these destroyed villages with other young Palestinians who were reactivating these spaces by exploring them, spending time, and holding ceremonies in them. They extend these practices of reactivation in their art installation And Yet My Mask Is Powerful (2015–2018). The U.S. premiere of the project took place at the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in Spring 2018 (Figure 2).1
Figure 2. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2018. Still from installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
The title and much of the text within And Yet My Mask Is Powerful draw from Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck” (1973), in which Rich describes a diver, first a single feminine “I,” then a plural, “I am she: I am he,” “we” who seeks out “the wreck and not the story of the wreck/the thing itself and not the myth.” Often read as a metaphor of the wreckage that gender and sexuality norms and patriarchy leave in their wake, within the context of And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, Rich’s poem takes on additional complexity as it registers another wreck—destroyed Palestinian villages. As Abou-Rahme and Abbas show in the multiple videos projected on the walls of a darkened gallery, these landscapes bear both “the evidence of damage worn by salt and sway into this threadbare beauty” and ongoing vegetal life—lush, thriving, wild (Figure 3).2
Figure 3. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2018. Still from installation at Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
By focusing on the wreck itself as place and possibility, Abou-Rahme and Abbas suggest that the political impasse of (one-state, two-state Palestinian) nation-state futurity is not the only movement or mobilization possible. To focus on the wreck itself and not the myth is to be with the land, which is “swarming with life” at a “time where they have declared me dead or dying.”3 This article, somewhere between art review and critical proposal, follows this livingness into the wreck, from destroyed Palestinian villages to the wreckage at the University of Illinois in the wake of Steven Salaita’s “unhiring” in 2014 to the wreck upon which the United States crafts its myth. Being in the wreck means engaging with and drawing from forms of ongoing life toward nation-building of another sort that does not reinscribe the terms of nation-state sovereignty but rather “sets out to change the order of the world.”4 For Abou-Rahme and Abbas, surrealism becomes one modality of an “insurgent aesthetics” that disorders historicity and sovereignty toward thinking from the cyclical time and place of flora and fauna.5 Rather than some fanciful game playing, surrealism, as Robin D. G. Kelley says, “is committed to the real, to the now, and to action.”6
And Yet My Mask Is Powerful awakens the specific “inter/national” decolonial relations that emerge when we consider how the conditions of Indigenous peoples in the United States and Palestine (and beyond) are existentially linked because, as Steven Salaita asserts, “Israel is not merely an ally or client of the United States, but a profound component of its imperial practice.”7 By thinking with/through/from Palestine, both the practices that Abou-Rahme and Abbas engage in the West Bank and the ongoing conditions in Gaza, I invoke the work of Steven Salaita, Nour Joudah, and other scholars who push us to reorient and provincialize our U.S.-based suppositions and institutional critiques, while also attending to the intimacies and responsibilities of our interrelated struggles.8 By thinking Palestine, American Indian studies (AIS), and Indigenous movements from sovereignty to surrealism together, this paper reactivates and enacts what the hiring of Steven Salaita at the University of Illinois was supposed to do—draw out and mobilize the connections of our (anti)colonial pasts, presents, and futures.9 The dried remains of destroyed Palestinian villages, shipped to and cared for in central Illinois, activate other catastrophes and wrecks. The current impasse and apocalyptic conditions of the settler colonial present at the scale of the university and its art museum compel us to activate the site in alternative ways.
In the spirit of Abou-Rahme and Abbas’s installation and the continued persistence of flora in the wild, this paper is the weed, the grass, the thorns, and the trees, a result of the labor of faculty and students who hired Salaita, organized around his case, and continue to think with and through Palestinian and Indigenous ways of knowing and being. This labor continues to sprout new growth, cycling through the seasons from the wreck, from the thing itself as efforts to rebuild American Indian studies begin anew. Just as the installation relays practices of reactivating Palestinian villages long destroyed, bringing the installation to UIUC reactivated the wreck of Salaita’s termination and its effects on AIS and other interdisciplinary departments.
In the next three sections, I cycle from the exhibit to the university and back again. In the first section, I discuss the emergence of the exhibition from the specific context of Palestinian destroyed villages and history of the occupation. In the second section, I give a more detailed account of the context at the University of Illinois that led to Abou-Rahme and Abbas’s exhibition and then discuss faculty and student engagements with the exhibition in terms of what was or was not activated. I then return to the exhibit itself toward considering how the surreal, aesthetics, and the wreck itself offer a vantage point that expands our horizons of the possible.
I.
The iNakba app, a mobile application designed in 2014 by Zochrot, an Israeli NGO, maps destroyed villages onto Google Maps of Israel/Occupied Palestine. The app helps facilitate returns and reactivations of destroyed villages by both mapping and providing basic historical details and references for further research about what existed before and after 1948. In the illustration I describe above, two figures visit Kafr Bir’im. According to the iNakba app and Walid Khalidi’s All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, before 1948, Kafr Bir’im was a “stone-built village, surrounded by gardens, olive trees, and vineyards. . . . In modern times the population consisted of 700 Christians and 10 Muslims. . . . Agriculture, irrigated from the abundant springs, was the primary occupation of the villagers, who were especially active in olive and fruit cultivation.”10
The village surrendered in early November 1948 after Operation Hiram. Operation Hiram (October 18–31, 1948) was a military operation during the Arab–Israeli War of 1948, in which the Israel Defense Forces forcibly expelled the Arabs from their villages near the northern border with Lebanon, the Upper Galilee. Most of the villagers of Kafr Bir’im went to nearby villages, “‘temporarily’ expelled for ‘security reasons,’” expecting that they would be able to return to their homes, their animals, and their lands after the fighting between the Israeli forces and Arab Liberation Army had ceased.11 In July 1952, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that “there was no reason to prevent their return.”12 Despite or because of the court ruling, on September 16, 1953, the Israeli Air Force dropped incendiary bombs on Kafr Bir’im:
The work of destruction continued all the next day. The dynamiting turned this stone village into a heap of ruins. Kafr Bir’im was no more. Only the church remained. This obliteration of their homes made an indelible impression on the people of Kafr Bir’im. When the explosives were being put in place around their houses, they gathered weeping on a small elevation that overlooks the area. That place is now called the Hill of Tears.13
The Israeli settlement of Dovev is currently on the northwestern section of village land, while the Israeli settlement of Bar’am is on the northeast lands. For decades following their expulsion, the Palestinian landowners of Kafr Bir’im returned to their lands as wage laborers, now employed by these Israeli kibbutzim settlements. They waged multiple legal cases, popular campaigns, and protests to return to their lands, but the example of Kafr Bir’im and the nearby Iqrit were upheld by the Israeli state and military as villages that must remain uninhabited by returning Palestinians, initially for “security” reasons but ultimately because their return would “create a precedent for the repatriation of refugees,” undermining Zionist ideology and claims to the land.14 This description of dispossession is part of “the story of the wreck,” and these histories are critical to ongoing Palestinian struggles. They also narrate the ideological and legal impasse of Palestinian state sovereignty, rights to return, and the limits of one-state and two-state solutions. At this impasse, Abou-Rahme and Abbas wander into the wild, dive into the wreck, and tend to “the thing itself.”
The two-room installation evokes the “returns” of Palestinians and activates the land as terra and terrain in its fullness, as a condition of possibility for life itself, part of what Rosa Luxemburg, by way of Robert Nichols, refers to as “natural economy.”15 This is not land as property to be owned, exchanged, or stolen, but rather land as a located experience of possibility that exceeds the crisis of these times. While the land is the condition of possibility, the means of production, Abou-Rahme and Abbas are interested in “returns to the sites of destruction as an act that allows you to cast a different projection, an act that momentarily, viscerally, opens up a time that is not ‘our time,’ or a past time, but ‘another,’ unrealised time.”16 On a piece of notebook paper, pinned above and behind the sketch of two individuals in Kafr Bir’im, are notes, sketches, and a color code. A quote from Nasser Abourahme reads: “If colonial time delimits the field of future possibilities, the time of the ruin stands outside of the field of the possible entirely.”17 While ruins are often used as documentation of a history that has already happened, recuperated through archaeological reconstruction or paved over to disappear a past, what Abou-Rahme and Abbas propose is how these living ruins facilitate an errantry from the teleology and politics of colonial time and an ongoing structure of settler colonialism.18
Ruminating on “the thing itself,” an installation note opines that “a thing is an object but also a fossil, a form that is an index of the circumstances of its own death.” As I elaborate below, the things—dried leaves, seeds, fruits, rocks, human debris—brought to a land-grant university indexed both the violent colonial circumstances of their death but also contemporary practices of resurrecting relations to the land. Somewhere between science fiction and the surreal, the apocalypse “is already here,” the Nakba (catastrophe) is ongoing, and yet these return encounters continue to make life possible.19 On the same piece of notebook paper, Esmail Nashif is quoted midconversation: “On the one hand, s/he is the eternal returner to his/her ruins as a necessary continuation of what s/he is right now.”20 We enter midconversation and do not get “on the other hand,” though it is perhaps implicit in the sentence. One eternally returns to ruins in a way that seems like moving backward, as if stuck in the past, and yet this going back is necessary to continue moving forward. When one is at an impasse—a decades- and generations-long impasse—how does one continue and where does one go?
The returns to destroyed Palestinian villages conjure a “what if” as an alternative history. At the same time, they enact an “as if” not as a form of denial and escape but rather as “necessary continuation of what s/he is right now,” a turning away from the political end goals of both Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority. If we think of the establishment of ethnic studies, African American and Black studies, American Indian studies, gender and women’s studies, etc., as a type of Oslo Accords in which we were “granted” some recognition, power, resources, and self-governing from the university establishment in order to quell our peoples’ rebellions/intifada (uprising), where does this leave us now? How have the treaty/accords/concessions been honored?21 How have they limited our intellectual and political horizons in terms of what reparations, redistribution, or return look like at the level of the university and the settler state? What does this look like on the ground for our communities?
It is evident that theory and our collective intellectual labor has made a deep impact on our social movements. At the same time, however, how do we balance our increased presences in the academy, with the rise of targeted mass incarceration, increasing economic inequality, and other forms of “state-sanctioned and extra-legal vulnerability to premature death”?22 Have we “mistaken the map for the territory,” furthering an overrepresentation of a particular genre of the human through which we are “discursively and institutionally classified” according to our “Human Other status” or “wrongness of being”?23 Wynter recalls Black Arts and Black Aesthetics as practices toward an alternative genre of the human and suggests that we return to the texts and “utopian point of view” that emerged in the “black and other ethno-racial social movements of the 1960s . . . as well as the global anti-colonial struggles of ‘native’ colonized peoples, together with other struggles against racial apartheid.”24 Similarly, Robin D. G. Kelley reminds us, via Cheikh Tidiane Sylla, that despite its European origination “to recover what the traditional African has never lost,” the foundations of surrealism lie in anticolonial and revolutionary politics, beginning with the Paris Surrealist Group and the extreme Left of the French Communist Party coming “together in 1925 in their support of Abd-el-Krim, leader of the Rif uprising against French colonialism in Morocco.”25 Abou-Rahme and Abbas work similar gestures, “superceding existing reality,” pointing out the absurdity of Zionism and its wrecks and ruins (destroying olive groves and planting pine trees, the conditions in Gaza, over four hundred destroyed villages) as a point of departure toward another world and genre of being.26
II.
As a land-grant university, the University of Illinois is churning layers of wreckage, beginning with “the violently coerced dispossession” of the Peoria, Kaskaskia, Piankashaw, Wea, Miami, Mascouten, Odawa, Sauk, Meskwaki, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, Ojibwe, and Chickasaw peoples, who, as Chickasaw scholar Jodi Byrd asserts, “knew, cared for, and learned on these lands and in their own institutions long before settlers arrived.”27 Curator Amy Powell and Junaid Rana and I, faculty members on Nevada Street (where the Program in American Indian Studies and Departments of African American Studies, Asian American Studies, Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender and Women’s Studies are located), began discussions about Abbas and Abou-Rahme’s work and bringing it to the University of Illinois in 2016, amid the additional wreck caused by the UIUC Board of Trustees and administration’s unhiring of Steven Salaita in 2014, which is referenced in the excerpt of Chickasaw scholar Jenny L. Davis’s poem in the epigraph. Additionally, while the mythical Chief Illiniwek was retired by the university in 2007 after pressure from the NCAA, “the Chief” remains a trenchant symbol for UIUC students and alumni, enacting the ongoing work of settler colonialism amid recently instituted land acknowledgments and efforts to rebuild the Program in American Indian Studies after its disintegration in the aftermath of the firing of Salaita (most of the faculty either left the university for other institutions or moved their lines out of the program). The ongoing attachment and evocation of “the Chief” symbolizes settler “majoritarian angst” and “the settler’s attempt at belonging in America.”28
In 2012, professor Robert Warrior, American Indian Studies director, submitted and received approval for a hiring request for an assistant or associate professor whose work provided “evidence of innovative transnational, comparative, creative, or interdisciplinary approaches to American Indian or Indigenous Studies.” Salaita was one of six candidates who visited campus in spring 2013 and was the unanimous choice of the AIS faculty.29 Jodi Byrd and Vincente Diaz cochaired the hiring committee, and at the time of Salaita’s unhiring in 2014, Byrd was the interim director of AIS. During the July–August 2014 Israeli offensive on Gaza in which thousands of Palestinians were killed and over ten thousand wounded, Salaita posted what would later be considered inflammatory and “uncivil” tweets that would allegedly warrant his initial unhiring by UIUC chancellor Phyllis Wise and later the University of Illinois Board of Trustees. The American Association of University Professors compiled a report that found that the university “acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure and the university’s own stated policies on the subject. . . . The stated reasons for the rejection of the Salaita appointment by the chancellor and the board of trustees violated Professor Salaita’s academic freedom and have cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected.”30
While Salaita has written about the impact of these events on his own life, students and faculty at UIUC continue to live in the wreck as well, examining our complicities and (in)capacities, conjuring our own “what if’s,” and working against an exceptionalism that pertains to speech that criticizes Zionism and Israeli occupation.31 As Davis states in her poem, “The (American) Indian (Studies) Removal Act of 2014,” “but my sorrow tells me there were also tears / from those who were left behind.”32 Student activists have been faced with charges of antisemitism; on October 9, 2019, UIUC chancellor Robert Jones sent out a campus-wide email in which he condemned a student presentation about Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation as antisemitic because it “incited division, distrust and anger.” Most problematically, he situated this training as more problematic than the appearance of swastikas on campus that week. Action steps only addressed the particular training and said nothing about steps to address blatant acts of white supremacist and settler colonial racism on campus. While the student government passed a resolution demanding a retraction, Chancellor Jones has yet to retract his statement.33 Despite multiple setbacks and attempts at silencing, Students for Justice in Palestine and their allies have waged multiple campaigns for university divestment from Israel and in 2020 passed student government resolution 04.22, “Human Rights Violations in University Investments and Police Forces,” which calls for “the divestment from transnational companies that contribute to the American and Israeli military, prisons, police forces, and ICE.”34
What investments do universities like UIUC have in furthering a settler colonial agenda, simultaneously Zionist and American, beyond immediate concerns regarding donors and funders? The University of Illinois was founded as Illinois Industrial University in 1867 and was one of the original thirty-seven public land-grant institutions created by the Morrill Act. The Morrill Act was passed and signed into law by President Lincoln in 1862 after seven Southern states seceded from the Union (giving Congress the needed votes and Union states access to federal public land). The act allotted “thirty thousand acres of recently appropriated Indigenous lands for each senator and representative to stake out. States were encouraged to sell these ‘land grants’ to raise money for new public universities that would research and educate American settlers in agriculture, science, and mechanical arts.”35 Land became capital for constructing universities; in turn, universities promoted the settler colonial domestication of land with an emphasis on agricultural and mechanical engineering, as well as the disciplining of a labor force through the “liberal and practical education of the industrial classes.”36
After the Association for Asian American Studies and the American Studies Association advanced resolutions to support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call from Palestinian civil society in 2013, the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) published a statement on January 2, 2014, in which they announced their strong opposition to “the boycott of Israeli academic institutions supported by certain U.S. scholarly organizations.”37 While citing “freedom of inquiry and expression” and “free exchange of ideas” as foundational principles, the APLU did not mention how Israeli occupation inhibits Palestinians in their pursuits of such freedoms. Rather, the APLU statement was concerned with how a boycott would affect American and Israeli collaboration “on critical projects that advance humanity, develop new technologies, and improve health and well-being across the globe.”38
In this period of significant mobilization of support for the BDS movement, AIS at Illinois attempted to “emphasize the global implications of what that land grant obligation meant to us” through hiring Steven Salaita as part of a “capacious vision for our unit.”39 As Byrd states, Salaita’s “work on the circulation of indigeneity as a concept across Israel, Palestine, and the United States offered, we felt, a necessary intervention to the current prominence of settler colonial studies within the discipline of indigenous studies.”40 For Salaita himself, his termination was “a representation of the marginal standing of American Indian and Indigenous Studies. . . . That university administrators deployed the language of civility in the wake of its decision illuminates a model of governance deeply rooted in colonial ethos.”41 Indeed, the paternalism of this colonial ethos is deeply embedded in how university administrators treat and have treated American Indian studies and other interdisciplines in ways that “devalue AIS as a field and Native people as sovereign agents.”42 As Diaz states, “The principle of unit autonomy is the bedrock of shared governance, which is key to proper academic governance, whose ultimate objective is to safeguard academic integrity and excellence.”43 This principle of unit autonomy was shown to be a ruse, a camouflage, and speaks to how the Third World studies, critical Indigenous studies, ethnic studies, and gender studies institutional projects were undermined from their moment of establishment in the university.44 This controversy, this wrecking, brought into relief how notions of autonomy, sovereignty, and nationhood have little place, let alone space, in the neoliberal and settler colonial university. For, as Salaita states, “administrators have great impetus to forestall decolonial projects. . . . The University of Illinois administration maligned Native America and Palestine simultaneously . . . conferring normativity to the commonsensical practices of US and Israeli imperialism.”45
III.
How does approaching the university as wreck shift what we do with it? What becomes possible when we approach it with a “decolonial intentionality”?46 La paperson argues that like third cinema, a third university exists within the “first university”—“it is part of the machinery of the university, a part that works by breaking down and producing counters to the first and second machineries. A strategic reassemblage of first world parts, it is not a decolonized university but a decolonizing one” that is strategic and timely but also problematic and antiutopian.47 It is problematic in the sense that it still produces for capitalism, it takes time and energy that could be directed elsewhere, and it charges fees and grants degrees. It is antiutopian in that it is not the ideal (second world) university of students’ liberated minds and self-actualization; rather, we must “refuse a utopic description for a strategic decolonizing machine.”48 In the introduction to Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s call for the undercommons, Jack Halberstam describes the “wild beyond” as “a wild place that is not simply the left over space that limns real and regulated zones of polite society; rather it is a wild place that continuously produced its own unregulated wildness.”49 The wild beyond is one of many possibilities of a third university assemblage, some more “polite” and regulated than others, while it also necessitates consistent disordering and “unregulated wildness” lest it be absorbed. Abou-Rahme and Abbas take us to wild places in the below of colonial occupation, perhaps temporary, but useful for disorienting us enough to recognize the ruses of possession, organization, “the logical, logistical, the housed, and the positioned.”50 Its more sustained impact is in the seeds it plants toward rearranging the machinery of the university and for providing a site for diving into an unregulated wildness that expands horizons of the possible and conjuring another time.
Curator Amy Powell and artists Abou-Rahme and Abbas recognized the significance of bringing the insurgent flora of Palestine to Illinois, this site in which Indigenous sovereignty was consistently maligned and Palestinian rights to speak and be present were so contested. The installation forced the university to host another “home,” another site of Indigeneity and settler colonialism to be present, to enact the “circulation of indigeneity” as both a concept and a set of practices.51 And Yet My Mask Is Powerful commemorates “life and death simultaneously,” demonstrating how “the land is never dead” and how the colonial project is never complete.52
In bringing the flora of Palestine, of villages that “no longer exist” to central Illinois, Abou-Rahme and Abbas orchestrate a series of complexities for the institution while also signifying a “deep history on the land” and the native plants’ continued living against erasure. Lila Sharif describes how a primary tactic of Zionist narratives and practices of colonial settlement has been the “eco-occupation” and “vanishment” of Palestinian landscapes through the uprooting of native vegetation and the planting of pine trees from Europe and eucalyptus trees from Australia.53 In her reading of Raja Shehadeh’s Palestinian Walks, Sharif draws attention to the “failure of law to contend with settler-colonial vanishment” and challenges the idea that Indigenous disappearance may be “linear and inevitable.”54 While Shehadeh’s walks through Palestine over two decades chart a vanishing landscape due to settler encroachment, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful demonstrates the insurgencies of vegetal life at the sites of prior destruction (Figure 4).
Figure 4. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2018. Detail image of installation at Krannert Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the author.
Image Description
At the center of this installation is are two pages from an unlined notebook opened in a spread. On the left page there is a color drawing of a pine tree’s canopy with cones showing as square blocks in brown. On the right page there are a few lines of text that read,
When the pine trees arrived we did not know they would be used to change the contours of a once recognizable LANDSCAPE. We did not know they woudl be used to conceal the ruins of our villiage, to obscure the path back.
Not able to transport living plants to the United States, Abou-Rahme and Abbas arranged for plants and other flora from these destroyed villages to be dried—increasing their fragility—and then shipped to Champaign, Illinois, where they were then attended to by university gallery staff. In normal circumstances for such installations, the artwork would have been destroyed after the exhibition, but to destroy the once-already-destroyed was ethically impossible, and Powell orchestrated a way for the university to be responsible for the materials and then to return them to the artists after the show. This required multiple conversations with university administrators, other museums, the artists, and their gallery representation.
At the Krannert Art Museum, gallery workers painted the walls a deep marine blue; visitors were likewise encouraged to take a dive and explore the wreck. As Adrienne Rich poetically describes it, “I am blacking out and yet / my mask is powerful . . . and now: it is easy to forget / what I came for / among so many who have always / lived here.”55 While Rich is diving into the sea, learning how “to turn my body without force / in the deep element,” Abou-Rahme and Abbas delve deeply into the ruins, to experience another unrealized time. It is “outside of the field of the possible,” but it is also a site of potentialities for new things to emerge. Their deep dive is also internet-based; they reproduce images that index their web searches and websites, like their discovery of the Israel Museum’s 2014 exhibition of Neolithic masks (nine thousand years old, predating the Prophet Abraham and the Old Testament) “recovered” throughout the West Bank by generals (like the iconic Moshe Dayan), private collectors (like Judy and Michael Steinhardt of New York), and archaeologists.56 The uploaded exhibition catalog included detailed images of the Neolithic masks, which served as a guide for Abou-Rahme and Abbas as they produced their own 3D-printed versions. They and their fellow Palestinian youth carried the printed masks into razed villages, holding them to their faces as they wandered and reveled, animating their surreal power with their bodies and the land, while likewise being transformed by the masks and the land themselves. As they write in a related story:
I looked out onto Kufer Birim through the strange circular eyes, and all I could think was if this was meant as a spirit mask for the dead when it was made, what is it a spirit mask for now? For the dead or for the living? I was surrounded by bushes, plants and trees that were all shades of phosphoric green, I don’t know if it was the effect of the heat or the mask but I felt like the whole place was alive, swarming with life. I just had to use the mask, to look out from under its eyes, to become it and let it become me. And then I could step out of time, out of the time they invented, this time that is occupied, this time where they have declared me dead or dying. I am alive, this destroyed village is alive, this mask is for the living.57
Abou-Rahme and Abbas reproduced and repurposed the Neolithic masks as a hack against settler archaeology and nation-state mythmaking. When images of And Yet My Mask Is Powerful infiltrated web searches for the Neolithic history and masks of Israeli territory, the Israel Museum removed their catalog from the internet.
During a question and answer session with the artists, they received a query about whether they were claiming that the Neolithic masks were Palestinian. Implied in this question was a critique of Palestinian claims to Indigeneity over Zionist claims. Abou-Rahme and Abbas later said that Zionist critics are confounded by their work. And Yet My Mask Is Powerful does not show “Palestinian suffering” in the form of recently destroyed buildings, infrastructures, bodies, and borders. Rather, it ventures into a wild beyond that turns away from questions of a nation-state or ethnostate to direct relationships to land and the life that it makes possible; it condemns the occupation but is not defined by it. Zionists are not able to respond to the materiality of what Abou-Rahme and Abbas are presenting—Neolithic masks, web searches, dried branches, leaves, garbage, drawings, printouts, and photographs. They are not claiming a Palestinian Neolithic past. These masks were produced by ancient peoples; according to the Israeli curator, they were possibly “the first” to inhabit the land, predating multiple civilizations, empires, and nations. In this materiality is the insurgent practice that conjures Palestinian futures and historical consciousness in the same instance, rooted to land, to a place, to a geography. This land, this wreck, continues to enact its seasonal cycles and is also reactivated for social life as Palestinians perform weddings and other gatherings in these spaces, reclaiming these wrecks, these destroyed villages—not to tell the narrative of the wreck, but to see and be in the wreck itself. It provides these Palestinians a vision of social relations, “land as pedagogy” and surreal manifestation, not determined by man-made laws and settler colonial time, especially at the impasse of knowing that one or two states will not liberate them.58 The wreck offers its own force and opportunities, steps away from an apartheid road. Because it is already “destroyed,” it is suspended from threat in the meantime. It reminds me of the postapocalyptic beyond of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, where “as soon as humans appear, everything begins to change,” that offers an opening to new ways of being and knowing, taking cues from the wreck itself.59 And this is perhaps why the surreal offers a way through the wreck, to lift “the spell of the impassable barrier” in which the land becomes what they want it to be.60
Videos projected across multiple walls at odd angles propel us into the wild, or what Kara Keeling describes as the Open, a set of images we cannot easily recognize that force us into new thinking: “The set of what appears has become the Open; undecidable, unlocateable, nonchronological pasts, presents, and futures are framed as visions. A time-image appears that jams the spectator’s sensory-motor schema, rendering her a seer.”61 These returns enable a seeing into other times, parallel histories, and possibilities. The videos in one room and the installation in another impose a new order and fill space toward a radical elsewhere that we can walk through—ever carefully and fully embodied. Abou-Rahme and Abbas, in this work and others, put us back in our bodies as we focus attention to what is happening to them, whether because low frequency beats emitted through carefully calibrated subwoofers are vibrating our insides or because we must maneuver so carefully through fragile aggregations of rocks and leaves and precariously piled pieces of paper. The suspended tension is reminiscent of trying to make a path out of decades of untamed vegetation; one maneuvers through a careful arrangement of seeds, leaves, pieces of paper, and pebbles that a gust of air or a slight nudge could potentially displace.62 One must watch one’s step.
Two major Israeli attacks on Gaza bookended the production of And Yet My Mask Is Powerful. The first, Operation Protective Edge in 2014, provoked Steven Salaita’s responses on Twitter, which were used to declare him “uncivil” that August. The Great March of Return, an ongoing nonviolent protest for the right of return for and by the people of Gaza, began on March 30, 2018. The Great March, spurred by a Facebook post by Ahmed Abu Artema, an influential writer, activist, and intellectual from Gaza, was inspired by decades of Palestinian efforts to return to their lands and offered an opportunity for those in Gaza to exercise their political agency beyond armed resistance and political negotiations, both of which had offered little fruit to the humanitarian crises in Gaza. In Abu Artema’s words, “[We are] a people that want life and nothing more. Nothing can delay this idea but the shackles of our self-delusions. We are dying in this tiny besieged place, so why not bolt before the knife reaches our throats? Since they are plotting to kick us south [to Egypt] after slaughtering us wholesale, why don’t we preempt them and begin to run north?”63 The material conditions that Abu Artema names include the Trump administration’s claim that Jerusalem is the capital of Israel and the withdrawal of U.S. funds from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, which provides basic educational, food, medical, and psychosocial support to the people of Gaza. This U.N. assistance is primarily needed because of the blockade that Israel has imposed on Gaza since 2007 and additional sanctions and border closures that have enclosed Gazans in one of the most densely populated areas in the world with little to no prospects for education or employment and ever-reduced amounts of potable water, food, and medicine. The United Nations claimed in 2017 that Gaza would be uninhabitable by 2020, because “Gaza’s only water source will be depleted, and irreversibly-so by 2020.”64 The water Gazans have been drinking is 95 percent contaminated and waterborne diseases have been steadily rising, as have the rates of stunted growth in children. With the onset of Covid-19, an already inhabitable situation has become worse.
For many, only two choices remain: “slow death by siege . . . or, defiance and rebellion, that is, for people to raise their voices en masse.”65 Abu Artema’s call was shaped by “what if” questions: “What if 200,000 demonstrators accompanied by international media marched peacefully and breached the barbwire fence east of Gaza to enter a few kilometers of our occupied land, carrying Palestinian flags and keys of return? What if they erected tents on the inside, established a tent city there, which they called Bab al-Shams, and were then joined by thousands of Palestinians from al-dakhil [the inside], and insisted on peacefully remaining there without resorting to any form of violence?”66
On March 30, 2018, an estimated 30,000–45,000 people marched to the border fence buffer zone with Palestinian flags and keys to their homes. Israeli snipers responded by killing 17 people and injuring over 1,500 more. Over the twenty-one months of the Great March, over 300 people, including journalists, health-care workers, and children, were killed and at least 7,900 Palestinians were injured with live ammunition.67 From Operation Protective Edge to the present, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been maimed with permanent injuries or left unsheltered; coupled with the siege that aims to keep Gazans barely alive, the Israeli approach is to imprison two million Gazans in an open-air prison but to thoroughly incapacitate them.68
As Abou-Rahme and Abbas visited UIUC to engage with students and to participate in two public events, an artists’ talk and a listening party, they also monitored the news coming from Gaza as the Great March continued. As part of a generation of young Palestinians who have lived much of their lives witnessing further encroachments of Israeli settlements and further enclosure around Gaza, they recognized the significance of the Great March and its signaling of a political will that exceeded the Hamas and Fatah factionalism and political authority. At the listening party, they played Palestinian trap music that drew from Black sonic aesthetics and infused it with Palestinian attempts to cross closed borders between the ’48, the West Bank, and Gaza.69 The Great March, the music, and the masks of And Yet My Mask Is Powerful all shape an “infrastructure of feeling” that conjures a wild beyond sourced in Palestinian ties to the land that requires another aesthetics for ushering in the “what if’s” and “as if’s” of Palestinian possibility.70
And Yet My Mask Is Powerful results from a confrontation with and an immobility from the “violence that has taken over the Arab world but equally finds its resonance across the world.”71 The apocalyptic reality and imaginary that is being imposed on Arab youth, this “apocalyptic vision that seems to clog up even the pores in our bodies,” forced Abou-Rahme and Abbas to consider ways out, to free themselves from themselves “in the here and now” toward constructing a “counter-mythology for a future memory.”72 The masks introduce an element of the surreal. The impassable barrier is real both materially and consciously, and to lift its spell or to transgress its lines into another time through another place is what Abbas and Abou-Rahme bring forward.
In the words of Martinican surrealist Suzanne Césaire, “Far from contradicting, diluting, or diverting our revolutionary feeling for life, surrealism shored it up. It nourished in us an impatient strength, endlessly sustaining this massive army of negations. And then I think also to tomorrow.”73 Similarly, the festival-like atmosphere that marked the Great March of Return’s encampment invoked its own surrealism, dabke dances opposite Israeli snipers against the black smoke of burning tires; an image of four women, three with their hands over their right eyes, and a fourth with a bandage over hers (Figure 5).74 The surrealist shoring up in the face of negation after negation expands a horizon of possibility through the juxtaposition of incongruent objects (snipers and dancing, Neolithic masks in the twenty-first century) and through an attention to the eye, a focal point literally and figuratively. The maiming of the eye in Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou (1929), the paintings of René Magritte, the writing of Georges Bataille, for example, situate the eye and ocular-centrism in relation to Enlightenment reason; Suzanne Césaire’s engagement with the ocular similarly questions the visually apparent through the figurative language of camouflage—how the verdant canopy of Martinican flora is neither exotic nor sentimental but rather a geography of possibility and modes of expression.
Figure 5. Palestinian journalist Wafaa Aludaini with a Palestinian protester who was shot in the eye by Israeli forces during the Great March of Return in Gaza. Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo, “What Is Next for Palestinian Popular Resistance in Gaza? Speaking to Journalist Wafaa Aludaini,” Middle East Monitor, June 1, 2020, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200601-what-is-next-for-palestinian-popular-resistance-in-gaza-speaking-to-journalist-wafaa-aludaini/.
I am trying to think through, then, what this set of surreal acts offers the Program in American Indian Studies and other interdisciplinary formations (the Departments of African American, Asian American, Latina/Latino, and Gender and Women’s Studies) at UIUC, another wreckage, another site of destruction, that is currently being infused with new hires and line transfers, new funding initiatives and mandates.75 How do we (re)build, sustain, and grow our departments and programs (as insurgent weeds and fertile grounds) upon and within the wreck, while also remaining aware of how we may reify the university as a “settled structure” by making claims to and through it?76 In following the work of abolitionists, how do we make nonreformist reforms that pick at the scars of histories and work with and become the weeds that refuse to be killed off? What would it take to bring back the territory in this rebuilding and prevent the further expansion of the university as settled structure?77 How do we think of the entire land-grant university, the state of Illinois, the United States of America as a teetering wreck—an instability and an insecurity that is inherent to the settler colonial project?
Steven Salaita suggests that the answer to every complexity of the Israel–Palestine conflict is that “a Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree.” “Who is Indigenous, Jews or Palestinians? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who is the aggressor? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who has a deep history on the land? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree. Who wrecks the environment with irresponsible human settlement? A Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree.”78
I quote this passage at length because this is an extralegal reasoning that has everything to do with how land forms the condition of possibility for life, both natural and social, and how the right of return and the continued recognition of Indigenous land and the violent and perpetual dispossession of its inhabitants is not simply about the exchange of property or possession (“Are you just going to give it all back?”) but about a set of relationalities that conjure a “home” and all the requisite responsibilities, hospitalities, and forms of care that go with it.79 Salaita’s testimony that a Palestinian would never destroy a healthy olive tree is part of an Indigenous structure of feeling and a recognition that the trees themselves are part of what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls an “infrastructure of feeling” that is the “consciousness-foundation, sturdy but not static, that viscerally underlies our capacity to select, to recognize possibility as we select and reselect liberatory lineages.”80 Abou-Rahme and Abbas catalog and build this infrastructure of feeling through a history that dates back to Neolithic masks and to paintings of imperial Persia, in which the pomegranate continues to be present and a part of everyday life for use and ornamentation. They conjure or borrow some of this infrastructural life force, carefully assembling it, designing it, placing it in the land-grant university’s museum, and then forcing the museum to augment its rules so that it will not be destroyed when the show ends. As in paperson’s acknowledgment that a third university exists in the first, “the political work is to assemble our efforts with a decolonizing spirit and an explicit commitment to decolonization that can be the basis of transnational collaborations and transhistorical endurance.”81 And Yet My Mask Is Powerful offered that possibility on its own and through conversations in galleries, classrooms, and living rooms that strengthened our endurance in what “might be a long winter” by expanding the horizons of where and what is possible.
Similarly, when Indigenous groups like the Water Protectors, Idle No More, Red Nation, and the protectors of Mauna Kea enact their stewardship of the water, land, and mountains, they enact an infrastructure of feeling, however “crisis-driven or even exhaustion-provoked,” that materializes the relationship of Indigeneity between people and place.82 The example of Gaza demonstrates how “water shows us the intricacies and intimacies of imperial violence,” its vulnerability to “catastrophic contamination,” and our relationships of dependency and interrelation.83 As Melanie K. Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy put it, “Water is seen as an ancestor and as a relative with agency within this network of life, one who deserves respect, care, and protection.”84 Because the land, the waters, the mountains are a part of this set of “grounded relationalities,” the injury of settler colonialism is compounded to a point where we can no longer, if we ever were, remain idle.85 As Abou-Rahme and Abbas push back against the “fossilized-state” of peoples who are colonized through an act of decolonial ritual (returning to and reactivating destroyed Palestinian villages), they give us a “flash of overcoming colonialism” through the practice of decolonization that is not necessarily an overthrow of the colonist in a legal sense, but neither is it a metaphor.86 It is a set of practices, a collectivity, a recognition, and activation of the very land, water, and mountains that are contested, calling forth and enacting a genealogy and infrastructure of feeling between a people and a place that exceed law, security, narrative, history, and the university.
Author Profile
Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and an associate professor in gender and women’s studies and Asian American studies at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her forthcoming book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is based on ethnographic research and filmmaking conducted with Muslim communities in the greater San Francisco Bay Area.
Notes
And Yet My Mask Is Powerful has also been presented at the Kunstverein in Hamburg, Germany (2018), Project Space Art Jameel, Dubai (2017), Alt Bomontiada in Istanbul (2017), and Carroll/Fletcher Gallery in London (2016). While I include some images from the exhibit here, for more detailed images, see “And Yet My Mask Is Powerful Part 1,” Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, https://www.baselandruanne.com/And-yet-my-mask-is-powerful-Part-1; “And Yet My Mask Is Powerful Part 2,” Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, https://baselandruanne.com/And-yet-my-mask-is-powerful-Part-2; Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, And Yet My Mask Is Powerful (New York: Printed Matter, 2017).
Adrienne Rich, Diving into the Wreck: Poems, 1971–1972 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), 22–24.
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, “Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, ‘Being in the Negative,’” Cooper Union, September 21, 2021, https://cooper.edu/events-and-exhibitions/events/basel-abbas-and-ruanne-abou-rahme-being-negative.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 2004), 35.
Ronak K. Kapadia, Insurgent Aesthetics: Security and the Queer Life of the Forever War (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2019).
D. Scott Miller, “A Conversation with Robin D. G. Kelley,” Open Space, May 30, 2017, https://openspace.sfmoma.org/2017/05/a-converstion-with-robin-d-g-kelley/.
Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), 24.
Salaita, Inter/Nationalism; Nadine Naber, “‘The U.S. and Israel Make the Connections for Us’: Anti-imperialism and Black-Palestinian Solidarity,” Critical Ethnic Studies 3, no. 2 (2017): 15–30; Samar Al-Bulushi, Sahana Ghosh, and Madiha Tahir, “American Anthropology, Decolonization, and the Politics of Location,” American Anthropologist, accessed on October 16, 2020, http://www.americananthropologist.org/al-bulushi-ghosh-and-tahir/; Nour Joudah, “Intervention—‘Gaza as Site and Method: The Settler Colonial City Without Settlers,’” Antipode Online (blog), August 24, 2020, https://antipodeonline.org/2020/08/24/gaza-as-site-and-method/.
I offer this thinking labor as a non-Indigenous and non-Palestinian relative to these struggles, as one who has global mobility and culpabilities as an American citizen and as one whose own relationships to land and water have been deeply affected, both enabled and inhibited, by U.S. empire, settler colonialism, and racial capitalism. Following Mariame Kaba, I want to get free, and we need each other to do that. Mariame Kaba, We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2021).
Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992), 460–61.
Khalidi, All That Remains, 461. See also Benny Morris, “Operation Hiram Revisited: A Correction,” Journal of Palestine Studies 28, no. 2 (1999): 68–76; Joseph L. Ryan, “Refugees within Israel: The Case of the Villagers of Kafr Bir’Im and Iqrit,” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 4 (1973): 55–81.
Khalidi, 461.
Ryan, “Refugees within Israel,” 63.
Noura Erakat, Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2019), 56.
Robert Nichols, “Disaggregating Primitive Accumulation—Radical Philosophy,” Radical Philosophy 194 (Nov/Dec 2015): 18–28. Nichols is referencing Rosa Luxemburg, Accumulation of Capital (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, “And Yet My Mask Is Powerful, 2016,” Art Basel, https://www.artbasel.com/catalog/artwork/37973/Basel-Abbas-and-Ruanne-Abou-Rahme-And-Yet-My-Mask-Is-Powerful.
Nasser Abourahme is an interdisciplinary scholar of urban geography, political theory, and postcolonial studies. Abou-Rahme and Abbas often speak of themselves and their artwork as being part of a larger collective of Palestinian thinkers, artists, and musicians living in Palestine and in its diaspora.
The shape and perception of time itself, as well as its relationship to place, is contested as we consider issues of “temporal sovereignty” (Mark Rifkin, Beyond Settler Time: Temporal Sovereignty and Indigenous Self-Determination [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017]), “the coloniality of time” (Alejandro A. Vallega, “On Aesthetic Liberation: The Coloniality of Time and Latin American Thought,” Center of Study and Investigation for Decolonial Dialogues, https://www.dialogoglobal.com/barcelona/texts/vallega/temporality-and-aesthetic-liberation.pdf), “Palestine time” (Gregory A. Burris, The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination [Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2019]), the disordering and disrupting of linear time and a settler colonial grammar of place (Mishuana R. Goeman, “Disrupting a Settler-Colonial Grammar of Place: The Visual Memoir of Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie,” Theorizing Native Studies, ed. Audra Simpson and Andrea Smith, 235–65 [Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2014]), or “too much time and timelessness” (Sandra Ruiz, Ricanness: Enduring Time in Anticolonial Performance New York: New York University Press, 2019).
Nasser Abourahme, “Ruinous City, Ruinous Time: Future Suspended and the Science Fiction of the Present.” City 18, 4–5, (2014): 578.
Esmail Nashif (b. Jerusalem) is a Palestinian anthropologist, writer, and art curator currently based at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies.
I am taking up Palestine as lesson, rather than metaphor carefully, while also recognizing the potential flattening it may cause as a matter of scale, especially in the cases of unevenness across the different interdisciplines and the disparate experiences of Palestinians in Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the diaspora. The question of land and material redistribution is still and always present in this comparison, but what the juxtaposition offers is a way to think through how the Oslo Accords set the Palestinian cause on a trajectory that was to lead to nation-state sovereignty, and yet decades later we have the erosion and fragmentation of a Palestinian territory through illegal Israeli settlements and the further isolation of Gaza as a settler colonial city without settlers and its rural surroundings (Joudah, “Gaza as Site and Method”).
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–69 (Boulder, Colo.: Paradigm Publishers, 2006), 160–61.
Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” 160. Salaita (Inter/Nationalism) and Rifkin discuss how the frames of apartheid and settler colonialism carry important distinctions regarding matters of expropriation of land and resources and racialized subjugation as a “domestic” affair requiring inclusion or “the imposition of the state over existing people, whose prior presence makes them indigenous” (Mark Rifkin, “Indigeneity, Apartheid, Palestine: On the Transit of Political Metaphors,” Cultural Critique 95, no. 1 [2017]: 27). I think with Wynter and Ruth Wilson Gilmore as a way to further extend inter/nationalism; as Angela Davis and others make clear, the prison industrial complex in the United States is directly connected to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the incarceration of Palestinians (Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement [Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2016]). It is also no coincidence that Wynter’s first novel of an anticolonial struggle for promised land, The Hills of Hebron, is named by the British in messianic fashion for the biblical Hebron (Al-Khalil), the largest city of the West Bank, which is the site of ongoing Zionist settler violence.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003), 185, 159.
Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 193.
Jodi Byrd, “Academic Freedom and Justice at the University of Illinois: Jodi Byrd’s Response to Bruce Robbins,” Academic Freedom and Justice at the University of Illinois (blog), November 2, 2014, http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.com/2014/11/jodi-byrds-response-to-bruce-robbins.html.
Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 138.
Salaita’s tenure was approved on September 26, 2013, and both he and the department prepared for him to begin teaching at UIUC in August 2014. A full accounting of these events, as well as related issues of academic freedom, can be found in the American Association of University Professors (AAUP)’s report and Salaita’s own accounting and analysis. AAUP, “Academic Freedom and Tenure: The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,” April 2015, https://www.aaup.org/report/UIUC; Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).
AAUP, “Academic Freedom and Tenure.”
Steven Salaita, Uncivil Rites; Steve Salaita, “An Honest Living,” Steve Salaita (blog), February 17, 2019, https://stevesalaita.com/an-honest-living/.
Jenny L. Davis, “The (American) Indian (Studies) Removal Act of 2014,” As Us 6 (2016): https://asusjournal.org/issue-6/part-3-we-transform-the-academy/jenny-davis-poetry/.
“UIUC Students Organize against Efforts to Equate Anti-Zionism and Antisemitism,” Palestine Legal, October 30, 2019, https://palestinelegal.org/news/2019/10/30/uiuc-students-organize-against-efforts-to-equate-anti-zionism-and-antisemitism; “Backgrounder on Redefinition,” Palestine Legal, January 2020, https://palestinelegal.org/redefinition-efforts.
SJP UIUC, “FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE,” Facebook, September 28, 2020, https://www.facebook.com/SJP.UIUC/posts/pfbid0PQrMLJhfdmVwM6jfMUzbFZDwLoZzPdd5SRomYKvYZUaQSL28xWLzzjTU7FCT3tYvl.
la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), https://manifold.umn.edu/projects/a-third-university-is-possible.
See Morrill Act, sec. 4, para. 1, in paperson, Third University Is Possible. The prairie lands surrounding the University of Illinois are dominated by soy and corn fields, and the state of Illinois is the second leading exporter of both soybeans and feed grains; 44 percent of grains produced in Illinois are sold for export. “Facts about Illinois Agriculture,” Illinois Department of Agriculture, https://www2.illinois.gov/sites/agr/About/Pages/Facts-About-Illinois-Agriculture.aspx.
“APLU Statement in Opposition to Boycott of Israeli Academic Institutions,” Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, January 2, 2014, https://www.aplu.org/news-and-media/News/aplu-statement-in-opposition-to-boycott-of-israeli-academic-institutions.
“APLU Statement.”
Byrd, “Academic Freedom.”
Byrd.
Salaita, Uncivil Rites, 105.
Salaita, Inter/Nationalism, 137.
Vicente Diaz, “Academic Freedom and Justice at the University of Illinois: Vicente Diaz, Statement Read at the Meeting of the Whole, 9/22/14,” Academic Freedom and Justice at the University of Illinois (blog), September 9, 2014, http://uiucfaculty.blogspot.com/2014/09/vicente-diaz-statement-read-at-meeting.html. See also Vicente M. Diaz, “Native Pacific Studies and the Illinois Debacle: Indigeneity at the Edge of Nationalist Belongings and the Limits of Signification,” American Quarterly 67, no. 3 (September 2015): 597–608.
Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map”; Roderick A. Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Minority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Gary Y. Okihiro, Third World Studies: Theorizing Liberation (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2016); Joanne Barker, ed., Critically Sovereign: Indigenous Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
Salaita, Uncivil Rites, 105–8. In the maligning, the university also wrecked relationships that the department could potentially have with Indigenous communities. In a 2018 visit to UIUC, Kul Wicasa scholar Nick Estes detailed how the wreck of UIUC AIS affected the ability of activists in Chicago to do teach-ins at a #NoDAPL protest in 2016; AIS could have been an important site for organizing and mobilizing support for #NoDAPL throughout Illinois, especially since the Dakota Access Pipeline was to flow through the state as well. While activists continued to do the work, they also asked, “Where are the intellectuals?” (Nicholas Estes, “Indigenous Studies: As Radical as Reality Itself,” presented at the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, October 30, 2018). They were essentially, however indirectly, removed. Again. While some Indigenous scholars remained, the sense of collective possibility was diminished, especially as most of the tenured faculty left the unit or the university. If and how to rebuild AIS fell onto the shoulders of junior faculty in less than ideal conditions, as many faculty across the interdisciplines also had ambivalence about what rebuilding AIS would mean in the wake of blatant disregard of unit autonomy and the effects on peoples’ individuals lives and careers.
Paperson, Third University Is Possible.
Paperson. For paperson, the first university is driven by accumulation, while the second university is driven by critique, “mistaking its personalized pedagogy of self-actualization [vis-à-vis liberal arts, for example] for decolonial transformation.” Paperson’s intervention relates to the important calls that pose the questions of being in the university but not of it, especially as our embodied differences and critical politics are absorbed by the university as diversity and inclusion or particular forms of excellence for accumulation, in the following works: Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Wivenhoe, N.Y.: Minor Compositions, 2013); Ferguson, Reorder of Things; Piya Chatterjee and Sunaina Maira, eds., The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012).
Paperson, Third University Is Possible.
Jack Halberstam, “The Wild Beyond: With and For the Undercommons,” in Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 7.
Halberstam, “Wild Beyond,” 11.
Jodi A. Byrd, “Listening Party and Conversation with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme,” panel at Channing-Murray Foundation Chapel, Urbana, April 6, 2018.
Byrd, “Listening Party.”
Lila Sharif, “Vanishing Palestine,” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 1 (2016): 17–39.
Sharif, “Vanishing Palestine,” 35, 37.
Rich, Diving into the Wreck, 23.
On the uses of archaeology to buttress Zionist aspirations and statecraft, see Nadia L. Abu El-Haj, Facts on the Ground: Archaeological Practice and Territorial Self-Fashioning in Israeli Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
Abbas and Abou-Rahme, “Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme.”
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “Land as Pedagogy: Nishnaabeg Intelligence and Rebellious Transformation,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 3, no. 3 (2014): 1–25.
Andrei Tarkovsky, dir., Stalker (1979), 162 min.
Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945) (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 35.
Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 152.
In a previous sound-based work Contingency (2010), Abou-Rahme and Abbas convey the embodied sense of being at the Qalandia checkpoint between Ramallah (in the West Bank) and Jerusalem—the noise and overwhelming pressure and tension.
Abu Artema quoted in Jehad Abusalim, “The Great March of Return: An Organizer’s Perspective,” Journal of Palestine Studies 47, no. 4 (2018): 93.
United Nations Country Team, “Gaza 10 Years Later,” United Nations, 2017, https://unsco.unmissions.org/sites/default/files/gaza_10_years_later_-_11_july_2017.pdf.
Abusalim, “Great March of Return,” 94.
Abusalim, 92.
Hana Adli, “Adding Pandemic to Injury,” Electronic Intifada, September 24, 2020, https://electronicintifada.net/content/adding-pandemic-injury/31266.
“The Gaza Strip,” B’Tselem, November 11, 2017, https://www.btselem.org/gaza_strip.
The ’48 refers to lands that make up the territory of the Israeli state. Palestinians who were within these borders in 1948 are considered Israeli citizens. Families often found themselves on opposite sides of the border and farmers were often separated from their lands, both at this moment and throughout the continued occupation, as the security apparatuses of walls, checkpoints, and borders continue to be erected, cutting across Palestinian relations to each other and the land.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography and the Problem of Innocence,” Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson and Alex Lubin, 225–40 (Brooklyn: Verso, 2017), 236.
Abbas and Abou-Rahme, “And Yet My Mask Is Powerful.”
Abbas and Abou-Rahme.
Césaire, Great Camouflage, 37.
“‘Great Dance of Return’: Palestinians Perform Dabke to the Sound of Bullets,” Palestine Chronicle, July 1, 2018, https://www.palestinechronicle.com/great-dance-of-return-palestinians-perform-dabke-to-the-sound-of-bullets-video/; Ramzy Baroud and Romana Rubeo, “What Is Next for Palestinian Popular Resistance in Gaza? Speaking to Journalist Wafaa Aludaini,” Middle East Monitor, June 1, 2020, https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200601-what-is-next-for-palestinian-popular-resistance-in-gaza-speaking-to-journalist-wafaa-aludaini/.
I think this question can also be applied to university statements and commitments to racial justice across the United States in response to the Movement for Black Lives and the protests of 2020. How do we activate campuses that are incorporating more scholars of race (if that) as they remain reluctant to divest from relationships and companies that harm the environment and communities of color, from police to the military and environmental extraction? How do we keep our eyes on the territory and not the map? Lenape scholar Joanne Barker, following Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard, recommends “a ‘disciplined maintenance of resentment,’ a ‘politicized anger’ toward state oppression that refuses to accept guilt ridden, meaningless gestures of acknowledgment and payouts for genuine reparations and land return.” I agree. Joanne Barker, “Confluence: Water as an Analytic of Indigenous Feminisms,” American Indian Culture and Research Journal 43, no. 3 (2019): 30.
Barker, “Confluence,” 13.
One way this is happening is through the work that Jenny L. Davis has done to bring the University of Illinois into compliance with the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 (NAGPRA). The university implemented a “moratorium on research, teaching, display, imaging, and circulation of human remains and cultural items that are potentially subject to NAGPRA, including all on-site or loaned collections, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign” on September 15, 2020, and hired a program officer to begin a comprehensive cataloging of university holdings and research relationships to living peoples toward facilitating their return (thirty years after NAGPRA was enacted). University of Illinois, “Moratorium—Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) Program,” 2020, https://nagpra.illinois.edu/moratorium/.
Salaita, Uncivil Rights, 23.
Robert Nichols, “Theft Is Property! The Recursive Logic of Dispossession,” Political Theory 46, no. 1 (2018): 3–28.
Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography,” 237.
Paperson, Third University Is Possible.
Gilmore, “Abolition Geography,” 237.
Barker, “Confluence,” 6.
Melanie K. Yazzie and Cutcha Risling Baldy, “Indigenous Peoples and the Politics of Water,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education, Society 6, no. 2 (2018): 1.
Jodi A. Byrd, Alyosha Goldstein, Jodi Melamed, and Chandan Reddy, “Predatory Value: Economies of Dispossession and Disturbed Relationalities,” Social Text 36, no. 2 (June 2018): 1–18.
Eve Tuck and K. Wang Yang, “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor,” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (2012): 1–40.