An Arabic translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem is available in Omran 38 (Autumn): 175-206.
About the article
This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. “Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" was originally published in Critical Inquiry 47 in 2020.
Lila Abu-Lughod is The Joseph L. Buttenweiser Professor of Social Science at Columbia University in the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality.
Aamer Ibraheem is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University, New York.
Omran is a quarterly peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the social sciences and published by The Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies and the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies. Issue 38 is a special edition on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict.
About Omran’s special issue Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Conflict
Following an introduction by guest editor Nadim Rouhana, this issue includes six studies in a special issue on Settler Colonialism and the Palestinian-Zionist Struggle: "Settler Colonialism or Apartheid: Do We Have to Choose?" by Azmi Bishara; "Zionism and the Dilemma of Legitimizing Settler Colonialism: Religious Discourse as a Response to the Palestinian Resistance" by Nadim Rouhana; "Rethinking the Condition of Indirect Rule: Metamorphosis of the Israeli Colonial Governance and the Palestinian Resistance" by Hani Awad & Maryam Hawari; "Islamophobia, Antisemitism, Zionism, Settler Colonialism" by Lorenzo Veracini; "Where in the World is Palestine?" by Hamid Dabashi; and "International Law and Settler Colonialism in Historical Palestine" by Ilan Pappe. Also provided is a translation of Lila Abu-Lughod's "Imagining Palestine's Alter-Natives: Settler Colonialism and Museum Politics" by Aamer Ibraheem.
The book review section includes Ahmed Mamoun's review of The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi; Yara Nassar's review of Decolonizing Palestine: Hamas between the Anticolonial and the Postcolonial by Somdeep Sen; Maryam AlHajri's review of Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities by Mahmood Mamdani; and, finally, Ihab Maharmeh's review of Stone Men: The Palestinians Who Built Israel by Andrew Ross.