Join us for an evening with Nasser Abourahme in celebration of his recent book, The Time beneath the Concrete (Duke, 2025).
TIME
Monday, April 6, 2026
6:10PM
VENUE
Scheps Library, Room 457,
Department of Anthropology
Schermerhorn Extension
Non-affiliates must register by Friday, April 3 at 12pm to gain access to Columbia’s campus.
Copies of The Time beneath the Concrete will be available for purchase.
Settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. This is nowhere clearer than in the struggle over Palestine. And at no point starker than in the Gaza genocide. In this talk, I take as my primary object the Palestinian refugee camps created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding to show how these camps become the main place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. This struggle is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.
Nasser Abourahme is a writer and teacher, and currently assistant professor at Bowdoin College. He works broadly at the intersection of colonial history and political theory, and his writing can be found in places like Critical Times, Radical Philosophy, Cultural Critique, and Critical Ethnic Studies. His book The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke, 2025) was awarded the Palestine Book Award of 2025, and the Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award.