27/02/2023
Palestine & the Culture of Denial
Wednesday 8 March, 7.00-8.30 pm
Institute of Postcolonial Studies
Join Saree Makdisi and Jordy Silverstein we unearth the underside of the liberal settler imagination.
How can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite–as an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism?
Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by many as a manifestation of progressive values. Key to this miraculous act of political alchemy is a very specific form of denial.
Professor Saree Makdisi’s research is situated at the crossroads of British Romanticism, imperial culture, and postcolonial theory and criticism. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world.
His most recent book is Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). He is also the author of Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2010); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998).
This talk is part of a series on Palestine, anticolonial solidarity and public critique at the Institute of Postcolonial Studies in collaboration with the Australia Palestine Advocacy Network and Free Palestine Melbourne.
Free, though register to join us, link in bio!
The Institute of Postcolonial Studies is an independent public education project – we interrogate colonial relations.
We acknowledge the Wurundjeri owners and custodians of the Eastern Kulin nation. IPCS stands in solidarity with Indigenous struggles for social justice and decolonisation in so called Australia and globally. Sovereignty was never ceded.
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