Palestine: Between colonial epistemologies and liberation worldmaking
As part of the Critical Approaches to Race Seminar Series, we are honored to welcome Dr. Omar Jabary Salamanca, research fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles.
Epistemologies matter. They are doors into how we come to recognize and apprehend the world. They determine what counts as knowledge, what kinds of things can be known or who can produce knowledge. Epistemologies have indeed the power to erase, remake and transform worlds. They can distort and render unrecognizable the experiences, histories and geographies of those contained within their conceptual constructs. Epistemologies however can also be emancipatory and contribute to the fundamental task of liberation. This intervention considers settler colonialism as a central paradigm to the epistemologies that inform the worldview and experience of genocidal violence and national liberation. Drawing on the intellectual work and knowledge infrastructures of Palestinian and revolutionary scholars, it explores the lives of settler colonialism as a concept – from its consolidation and decline during the long revolutionary 1960s to its recuperation in the aftermath of the Oslo accords and its attempted suppression in the current political juncture. In following the lives of settler colonialism, the contribution reasserts the significance of this indigenous analytic to challenge the imperial legitimacy of settler sovereignty and contribute to the internationalist struggle for self-determination and liberation in and beyond Palestine.
About the Speaker:
Omar Jabary Salamanca is a research fellow at the Université libre de Bruxelles. His work and teaching lie at the intersection of political geography, settler colonialism, uneven development and political ecology. He is also interested in internationalist histories and archival practices of anticolonial movements.
If you want to join this seminar, please send us an email at birmm@vub.be