How does Palestinian anticolonial resistance struggle against the colonization of our concept of time?

Overview

In answering the call to abolish the cultures of Nakba, how do we confront the Nakba’s planetary scale and the forms of “elemental intifada” by which the land refuses its colonial subjugation? In the wake of the World Wars, Palestine proved the epicenter of the West’s attempt to reestablish capital’s global rule by whitewashing its crimes in the colonies. The genocidal onslaught against historic Palestine and the ecocidal assault on our shared earth are inextricably bound to the same global reordering. Both are grounded in a foundational lie: that catastrophe is inevitable, irreversible, and immune from contest. In thinking with the Arabic language, to speak of ecological “disaster” is always already to have named “Nakba.”

In this conversation, Palestinian thinkers Peter Makhlouf and Sherena Razek sketch the chronic contours of Nakba as a temporal technology for securing colonial-capitalist futurity. They will probe how Palestinians militate against the imperial grammars of time that anesthetize us to the infrastructures of accumulation and dispossession that join Palestine and the planetary. Moving across poetry, film, visual culture, and collective praxis, the conversation will explore the temporal cosmologies within which the Palestinian culture of resistance refuses to allow the crimes of Nakba to be consigned to the elemental ash heap of history.

Context

In his recent book The Time Beneath the Concrete, Nasser Abourahme centers time as not merely the medium but, indeed, the object of the Palestinian struggle. Among the most potent weapons of the Zionist narrative is the myth of time’s irreversible passage. The Israeli state would have Palestinians understand the violent dispossessions of 1948 as a done deal: they should accept this fate and move on. But the steadfast nature of Palestinian resistance has trapped Israel in an eternal recurrence, condemned to spiral back, time and again, to an unfinished moment of foundational violence.

Under the regime of modernity, the idea that time inexorably marches forward—and thus confines colonial conquest to an untouchable past—stems from the same phantasm of infinite growth that fuels racial capitalism’s environmental onslaught. The historical or geographical enclosure of catastrophe is engineered as a barrier to perception, a form of unseeing Nakba’s at once local and global manifestations. Cultural production can either stand in complicity with this spatiotemporal quarantine of disaster or work towards destituting the aesthetic forms of (im)perception integral to the violence of planetary Nakba.

Content Notes: Discussion will cover ongoing conflicts, genocide and state violence.