The Center for Racial Justice (CRJ) is proud to present Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space with Amanda Batarseh, Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego.

Analyses of Palestinian poetics often expose the violent structure of ongoing-Nakba — the Zionist settler-colonial uprooting and removal of Palestinians (both physically from the land and physiologically from life) since 1948. Thinking beyond colonial epistemology, however, is not merely a task of refuting settler-colonial narratives but of dismantling the very ways of knowing that produce them. This talk re-centers a Palestinian analytic through the lens of “radicality,” which encompasses both Palestinian rootedness and revolutionary movement. This radicality both predates and regenerates in contravention of settler colonialism’s violent uprootings/removals, unsettling colonial-national constructs of spatial belonging, and cohering the decolonization of literary analysis to then decolonization of our physical geographies. Palestinian writers navigate the dynamic tensions between rootedness and movement to forge liberatory pathways, opening up alternative horizons of political and creative possibility.

Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is Assistant Professor of Literature at UC San Diego. Her teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.

Co-sponsored by Feminist Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), Students for Justice in Palestine, Faculty for Justice in Palestine, Center for Cultural Studies, Center for South Asian Studies (CSAS), Center for the Middle East and North Africa (CMENA), Anthropology Department, Sociology Department, Institute for Social Transformation, and People’s University.

Part of the year-long speaker series, Possibilities of Palestinian Refusal: Against Disciplining Knowledge and Movement. For more information, visit the CRJ website: https://crjucsc.com/.