USC American Studies & Ethnicity

Critical SWANA Studies Research Cluster
Resource List on Palestine and Lebanon on the one-year anniversary of October 7, 2023

Background
➔ “Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict,” MERIP Primer
➔ Our History Of Popular Resistance: Palestine Reading List, Palestinian Youth Movement
– a huge reading list including archival resources, articles, books, films, and more
focused on the history of Palestinian resistance and resilience
Gaza
➔ Gaza: Nearly Two Decades of Israeli Incursions, Siege, and Blockade, Journal of
Palestine Studies
➔ Books about Gaza, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs
➔ Sara Roy “Hamas and the Transformations of Political Islam in Palestine,” Current
History 2003.
Lebanon
➔ Lara Deeb, Maya Mikdashi, Tsolin Nalbantian, Nadya Sbati, “A Primer on Lebanon –
History, Palestine and Resistance to Israeli Violence,” MERIP, October 4, 2024,
https://merip.org/2024/10/a-primer-on-lebanon-history-palestine-and-resistance-to-israeli
-violence/
➔ Teach-in from Jadaliyya: “Israel’s Attacks on Lebanon: To What End?,” October 3, 2024
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vDsOnkcbq0
Palestine in American Studies
➔ American Quarterly on Palestine, Vol. 67, No. 4, December 2015
➔ Edward Said, “The Arab Portrayed”
➔ Sophia Azeb (ASE Alum!), “Who Will We Be When We Are Free?: On Palestine and
Futurity,” The Funambulist
➔ Angela Davis, Freedom is a Constant Struggle
➔ June Jordan, “Apologies to all the People in Lebanon,” 1982
Palestinian Feminist & Q***r Engagements
➔ Loubna Qutami, “Why Feminism? Why Now?: Reflections on the ‘Palestine is a Feminist
Issue’ Pledge,” Spectre Journal
➔ alQaws, “Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence”
➔ Sahar Francis, “Gendered Violence in Israeli Detention,” Journal of Palestine Studies
➔ Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, Sarah Ihmoud, & Suhad Dahir-Nashif, “Sexual Violence,
Women’s Bodies, and Israeli Settler Colonialism,” Jadaliyya
➔ Umayyah Cable (ASE Alum!), “An Uprising at The Perfect Moment: Palestine in the
1990s Culture Wars,” GLQ
➔ Solidarity With Palestine - A Radical Black Feminist Mandate: A Reading List, Black
Women Radicals – a huge reading list including articles, books, videos, and more
engaging with the long history of Black, Palestinian, and Woman of Color feminist
solidarity.
Books
➔ The Question of Palestine by Edward Said
➔ The Hundred Years War on Palestine by Rashid Khalidi
➔ Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory edited by Lila Abu-Lughod and
Ahmad H. Sa’di
➔ Incarcerated Childhood and the Politics of Unchilding by Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
➔ The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe
➔ How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs by Elizabeth Thompson
Documentaries
➔ Peace, Propaganda, and the Promised Land, Sut Jhally, Bathsheba Ratzkoff
➔ PFLP: Declaration Of World War, Koji Wakamatsu, Masao Adachi
➔ See also Palestine Film Institute
➔ The Palestine Exception: The Crackdown on Israel Criticism at Columbia and other US
Campuses
➔ ‘The Night Won’t End’: Biden’s War on Gaza
➔ It’s Bisan From Gaza, I’m Still Alive After Six Months of Bombing
Places to donate
➔ Middle East Children’s Alliance
➔ Palestine Children’s Relief Fund
➔ Medical Aid for Palestine
➔ Palestine Aid Society
➔ Center for Arab American Philanthropy, Disaster Relief Fund – Lebanon and
Gaza
➔ FAJR Scientific – US organization that sends doctors to Gaza to perform
orthopedic surgeries (e.g. knee and hip replacements)
News Sources
➔ Mondoweiss
➔ Al Jazeera
➔ The IMEU
➔ Middle East Eye
➔ MintPress News
➔ Democracy Now
Scholarly Commentary
➔ Jadaliyya on YouTube
➔ Makdisi Street, a podcast hosted by Professors Saree Makdisi, Ussama Makdisi, and Karim
Makdisi.
➔ "Oh... And Islamophobia!" The instrumentalization of DEI to mask repression after 10/7,
a panel with Dr. Evelyn Alsultany, Dr. Nadine Naber, and Nina Mehta
Organizations (U.S./Diaspora)
➔ Palestinian Youth Movement
➔ Palestinian Feminist Collective
➔ Samidoun: Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network
Civil Society Orgs
➔ al-Haq
➔ alQaws
➔ B’Tselem
Statements from Professional Organizations
➔ Middle East Studies Association
➔ Arab American Studies Association
➔ Palestine/Israel Scholars Open Letter to US Media
➔ AMENA Psychological Association
➔ Statement on Campus Protests and Movements for Palestinian Freedom, American
Studies Association
➔ Statement from the Arab American Studies Association on Israel’s Recent
Attacks on Lebanon, September 28, 2024
➔ Health Workers for Palestine

**PDF available with embedded links - please DM to receive a copy. ***

Interested in taking an ASE course in the Spring or exploring our Majors and Minors? Join us at our ASE Fall Fair on Wednesday, October 30th at 5pm!

AMST 343 FOOD, HEALTH AND CULTURE
is open and available for student enrollement.
"Sarah Portnoy uses food to deepen students’ understanding of Spanish vocabulary and Latino culture. Field trips to explore Olvera Street and Boyle Heights in Los Angeles are centered on food culture and justice." Seats are still open in AMST 343 (10420R) that meets on 2:00-4:50pm on Mondays, taught by Sarah Portnoy.

https://today.usc.edu/learning-through-food-at-usc/
https://www.sarahportnoy.org/

Learning through food at USC At USC, some of the most interesting courses on history, biology and sociology are taught via food — and students are eating it up.

Congratulations to ASE Prof. Ben Carrington on winning the inaugural American Sociological Association, Stuart Hall Award for Cultural Sociology!

Interested in working with Prof. Carrington? Consider taking his Fall 2024 course JOUR 300 Journalism and Society. The class is really about the role of journalism within society and a more Cultural Studies approach to journalism and the study of the media. Students in the course will examine topics such as news propaganda, conspiracy theories, power in the media, racial bias in reporting, truth and objectivity in journalism etc. The course should be of interest to ASE students who perhaps want to take a journalism course but one that is more focused on the social, cultural and political issues that shape journalism as an industry and field rather than learning about “how to be a journalist” per se.

This semester they will be following the US presidential election and how it is reported, as well as looking at how the media has been covering the conflict and war in Palestine/Israel; both topics that are pressing and of interest to ASE students right now.

JOUR 300: Journalism and Society (21084R) 4 Units
Fall 2024 – Tuesday – 2-5.20 p.m.

https://asaculturesection.org/culture-awards/
https://culturalfoundation.eu/stories/stuart-hall-1932-2014/

USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
University of Southern California

We are offering lots of exciting classes like AMST 449m with Prof. Jane Hu. Take a look at our online schedule and join us!

https://classes.usc.edu/term-20243/classes/amst/

USC APASA

"There’s a reason the videos Morales shares from the popular tourist destination are resonating so widely, according to Natalia Molina, a distinguished professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California.

“Especially if you come from an immigrant background, if you are Latino or an immigrant, it’s validating,” she says. “He puts a spotlight on them and treats them with respect, and you’re reminded of something that we shouldn’t need to be reminded of — that these are human beings who live whole lives.”

This 27-year-old keeps taking day laborers to Disneyland. One thing always catches his attention | CNN Jesús Morales, known as juixxe on TikTok, takes day laborers who rarely get time off to Disneyland and shares videos of their visits on social media.

The American Studies Association writes to offer support and solidarity to scholars, faculty, students, and staff around the world who are facing elimination, termination, suspension, and sanctions due to their advocacy for Palestinian freedom, their location in Gazan universities, their criticism of Zionism, their solidarity with resistance to occupation, and their condemnation of genocide, militarism, and war.

No group of scholars faces the perils of the present moment more than students, scholars, and academic staff in Gaza. Every one of Gaza’s higher education institutions has been destroyed and hundreds of Palestinian educators and thousands of students in Gaza have been murdered in a process that the Palestinian Feminist Collective has called “scholasticide.” Palestinian scholars in Israeli institutions have also been arrested and silenced, including internationally renowned feminist scholar, Dr. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian.

Across Europe and North America, scholars who criticize the ongoing genocide, or who criticize Zionism, or who support Palestinian freedom have been doxed, suspended, and fired. Contingent faculty, Muslim and Palestinian scholars, BIPOC and QTIPOC scholars have been the most vulnerable to these attacks. Our university administrations have remained silent about the assault on Gaza’s higher education infrastructure and about attacks on and endangerment of their own faculty and students who speak out against anti-Palestinian violence. Funding and support of the most vulnerable departments and faculty are threatened. Surveilling or sanctioning against teaching the full scope of the conflict (including its history, ecologies of warfare, or other related topics) creates an atmosphere of fear around intellectual engagement with war.

At the time of this writing, thousands of students at dozens of universities have been arrested. Students have been suspended and face other disciplinary action (such as expulsion and eviction), and threatened and met with police violence - some even hospitalized after being brutalized and/or pepper-sprayed - for erecting peaceful encampments to protest university investments in Israeli war machinery. Columbia University, a campus that requires students to read Edward Said and Franz Fanon in their first-year curriculum, has criminalized students for peaceful, non-violent protest to colonial occupation and genocide. The events at Columbia are part of a rising wave of over 100 student encampments and protests at the Claremont Colleges, UC and Cal State schools, CUNY, University of Minnesota, UT-Austin, Washington University in St. Louis, Emory University, University of Florida, Vanderbilt University, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, Yale University, Princeton, and more. Meanwhile, at USC, Asna Tabassum, the valedictorian of the graduating class of 2024, has been silenced due to imagined objections to her identity, her politics, and, indeed, her existence. The list of outrageous attacks on scholars at all kinds of higher educational institutions is too long to document here but taken together they represent an appalling complicity with a frontal attack on and policing of all knowledge production that doesn’t serve the interests of war.

The American Studies Association affirms its abolitionist principles, its commitments to intellectual criticism of war, empire, and elimination, its defense of insurgent knowledge production, and its solidarity with Palestinians. Our students have the right to learn from all perspectives. As scholars who may work at institutions located on unceded indigenous lands, or who work in buildings that were constructed by enslaved labor, or whose institutions benefit from war profiteering, we have a particular obligation to affirm the necessity of critical discourse, of academic dissent, of academic freedom, and of refusal to be complicit in genocide.

War on Gaza: Some of the prominent Palestinian academics and scientists killed by Israel
1940 Statement of Principles on Academic Freedom and Tenure
Academic Freedom in Times of War
Legislative Threats to Academic Freedom: Redefinitions of Antisemitism and Racism
Joint Statement by AAUP, Barnard and Columbia Chapters
AAUP President: Columbia President Shafik Trampled on Students’ Rights

https://theasa.net/about/campus-protest-statement

Thank you to Ron Andrade, Sonia Flores, Leticia Delgado, Liz Banuelos-Castro and USC La CASA for helping us host these amazing Puente students during their USC visit!

USC Undergraduates:
Are you interested in the intersection of race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and religion, and how they might impact your current field of study?

JOIN THE ASE CLUB!

Membership is not exclusive to ASE majors. Students in other majors are encouraged to participate! Member interests include, but are not limited to, the arts, politics, social injustices, economics, race relations and perceptions, historical narratives, theoretical study, and law.

Come to the pizza meeting where we will plan the restart of ASE Club for 2024-25 and establish student leaders!

Please share with interested students!

USC La CASA

ASE Congratulates Professors Oneka LaBennett and Karen Tongson on the receipt of their Dean’s Emblem Awards!

Professor Tongson received the “2023 Communicator of the Year Award” in the Humanities. The award honors scholars who contribute significant time and effort to meaningfully improve the public’s understanding of issues, influence policy, and/or raise the level of public discourse around research and scholarship conducted at Dornsife.

Professor LaBennett received the “2023 USC Dornsife Dean’s Emblem Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the space of diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging.

The award honors scholars for publications, research, or engagement with the public or academic community that address issues of access, representational diversity, the impact of marginalization or discrimination, and/or building inclusive communities.

ASE is honored to have these wonderful scholars in our midst!