Dr. Lana Tatour will be in residence at the Center for Palestine Studies during the 2019-2020 academic year.
Lana Tatour will be working on her book manuscript, Ambivalent Resistance: Palestinians in Israel and the Liberal Politics of Settler Colonialism and Human Rights, that explores the contemporary impasse of indigenous resistance to settler colonialism, focusing on ’48 Palestinians (known as Palestinian citizens of Israel). Building on an understanding of settler colonialism and liberalism as convergent and co-constitutive, rather than antithetical, and on an understanding of liberalism as entangled with racism, the book demonstrates that native resistance to settler colonialism has been shaped in relation to—and as a product of—the encounter of native populations with the liberal and racial politics of both human rights and the settler state. Ambivalent Resistance is based on ethnographic and archival research and foregrounds the institution of citizenship—marked by inclusionary and exclusionary sensibilities—and liberal human rights—functioning as vehicles of empowerment and domination—as ambivalent bases for native resistance in the national movement. Showing how liberal and multicultural versions of rights can reproduce the racializing logics of settler colonialism and entrench colonial domination, she analyses three cases: the national movement of ’48 Palestinians, the indigeneity claims of the Naqab Bedouin, and the politics of the Queer Palestinian movement.
Lana Tatour is an Adjunct Lecturer at the School of Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. She completed her Ph.D. in Politics at the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in 2017. Her doctoral research was awarded the Leigh Douglas Memorial runner-up prize for best Ph.D. dissertation on a Middle Eastern topic in the Social Sciences or Humanities by the British Society for Middle Eastern Studies (2018). Tatour was previously a fellow at the UNSW Faculty of Law, the Australian Human Rights Centre, and the Palestinian American Research Center.
