Call for Papers: Occupied Territories: On Palestine and Imperialism, a special issue of Qui Parle
The recent devastation of Palestine evinces the frontiers of contemporary imperialism as a geopolitical system, and poses new questions about the locality of struggle and solidarity in a globalized world—questions which turn inevitably on the relation to land. Scholars working both within and outside the Marxist tradition have long recognized that the most intensively developed forms of capitalism cannot transcend or bypass but instead accelerate the oldest forms of violent dispossession, including territorial accumulation through imperial expansion. Yet the sheer scale of the violence unleashed by the Israeli state over the past year, the unique position of Israel with respect to both US-dominated capitalist imperialism and longer histories of European racism, and the presently available terms and forms of resistance all demand that the Zionist occupation and genocide in Palestine be interrogated beyond readily available models of accumulation. The genocidal occupation we find there is not reducible to either the renewed production of capitalist space or the recrudescence of precapitalist forms. Rather, the Palestinian situation may necessitate a reconceptualization of relations between capitalist empire and its partly (but only ever partly) internalized outsides. The hope of this special issue is to enable critique that accounts for the territorial strategies by which claims to land are made on behalf of industry, religion, ethnicity, nationality, indigeneity, or cosmopolitanism. What are the consequences of this situation for an understanding of the current phase of capitalist imperialism and the possibilities for opposing it? How do the different modalities of economics, politics, and culture—for example, film, literature, social media, or religion—mediate these struggles?
In addition to debates over the distinction between imperialism, apartheid, and settler colonialism, the Palestinian genocide has thrown into sharp relief the parallels between the ongoing conflicts in Gaza, Sudan, Kashmir, and Congo as well as the relevance of the precedent set by BDS movements in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle. Investigations by the United Nations and reporting from news outlets such as Vox and Al Jazeera align with scholarly work by Steven Salaita, Edward Said, and Ilan Pappé in understanding the Israeli occupation in terms offered by the analytic and sub-discipline of settler colonialism and settler colonial studies.1 This popular and popularized framework has been problematized by theorists such as Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, as well as by the longer genealogy of Marxian critique against Zionism, which has historically understood the Zionist colonial project as a fundamentally imperial one.2 Finally, the potential for meaningful coalitional politics, brought to popular consciousness by the support shown by Palestinian resistance groups to the Ferguson protestors in 2014, animates the question of contemporary internationalism.3 Sune Haugbølle, writing for Historical Materialism, has recently excavated the partially successful Israeli efforts to criminalize Palestinian solidarity on the international stage, while Elora Shehabuddin has written compellingly from the perspective of the Global South. Even so, the scholarly conversation around internationalism and the Palestine Solidarity Movement, both at their height in the global sixties, remains underdeveloped, especially in accounting for genocidal occupation and partition in India, Africa, and Tibet.
This special issue calls for critical considerations of imperialism and resistance that are specifically attentive to the relationship between land, indigeneity, and racial ideology. The critical strategic challenges posed by the Palestinian situation, from the evident centrality of religion and racialization to the imperialist project to the weaponized financialization driving military manufacturing, may offer a focal point for clarifying the contemporary politics of global anticolonial and anticapitalist struggle. While we are most interested in articles on the urgent situation in Palestine, we are open to and encourage the consideration of other geographies and historical periods. We are especially interested in comparative work on coalitional potential; research on land and labor under occupation; reconceptualizations of the relationship between imperialism and capitalist accumulation; and analyses of the various ideological and cultural valences of contemporary occupations and territorial claims.
We encourage submissions from across all disciplines and schools of thought. Proposals are welcome on, but not limited to, the following topics:
● Imperialism and settler colonialism
● Histories of genocidal conflict
● Occupation
● Militarization
● Securitization
● Resistance
● Coalitional politics
● Violence and global capital
● Accumulation
● Enclosure
● Genocide and racialization
● Race and capital in a global context
● Empire and religion
● Capitalism and religion
● Religion and anticolonial struggle
● Anticolonial struggle, nationalism, and internationalism
● Ethnostates
● Indigeneity and land claims
● American foreign policy in the Middle East
● Labor and apartheid
● Borders and migration
Papers, along with a brief bio, are due July 1st through our manuscript portal. Please see our website for details on our peer review process and email inquiries to quiparlejournal@gmail.com.
1 See, respectively: Steven Salaita, Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine; Edward Said, The question of Palestine, and Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
2 To get a general sense of the contours of the debate, see Gordon Welty, “Israel: Between Colonialism and Imperialism,” Arnon Golan, “European Imperialism and the Development of Modern Palestine: Was Zionism a Form of Colonialism?” and Brenna Bhandar and Rafeef Ziadah, “Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies.”
3 See Kristian Davis Bailey, "Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza Era."
References
Bhandar, Brenna, and Rafeef Ziadah. “Acts and Omissions: Framing Settler Colonialism in Palestine Studies.” Jadaliyya, July 10, 2017.
https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/32857/Acts-and-Omissions-Framing-Settler-Colonialism-in-Palestine-St udies.
Bailey, Kristian Davis. "Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza Era." American Quarterly 67, no. 4 (2015): 1017-1026. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/aq.2015.0060.
Golan, Arnon. 2001. “European Imperialism and the Development of Modern Palestine: Was Zionism a Form of Colonialism?” Space and Polity 5 (2): 127–43. doi:10.1080/13562570120104445.
Haugbølle, Sune. "Global Palestine Solidarity and the Jewish Question", Historical Materialism 32, 1 (2024): 267-295, doi: https://doi.org/10.1163/1569206x-bja10043
Pappé, Ilan. The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine / Ilan Pappe. Oxford: Oneworld, 2006. Said, Edward W. The question of Palestine. New York/N. Y: Times Books, 1979.
Salaita, Steven. Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
Shehabuddin, Elora. "Palestine Solidarity: A View from the Global South." Feminist Studies 49, no. 2 (2023): 544-544. https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/fem.2023.a915929.
Welty, Gordon A. “Israel: Between Colonialism and Imperialism.” The Antioch Review 42, no. 1 (1984): 60–76. https://doi.org/10.2307/4611311.