Invited to Witness draws from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists to explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism by extending deliberately truncated invitations to visit Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. The book shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

Prof. Jenny Kelly in conversation with Prof. Nick Mitchell and Prof. Sophia Azeb

Jennifer Kelly is an Associate Professor in FMST and CRES. She graduated from UCSC with a double major in FMST and LIT, and received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin.

Presented by Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies

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