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Power, Performance, and Pleasure: Witnesses In Palestine and the Violence of Evidence

Fri, May 26, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 2, Indigo Ballroom A

Abstract

This paper draws from multi-sited ethnographic research on solidarity tours in Palestine to trace how tour guides narrate their past and present displacement to international tourists and how tourists understand and describe the ethics of their presence in Palestine. Deploying a transnational and interdisciplinary feminist analytic, this paper shows how epistemic violence, or violence at the site of knowledge production, shapes tourists’ expectations of Palestine and predetermines how they understand their potential role in Palestinian freedom struggles. On solidarity tours, Palestinians are expected to provide evidence of their own, extremely well documented, dispossession against a constellation of U.S. and Israeli state sanctioned narratives that have cast Palestinians as unreliable narrators. This paper argues that, while solidarity tourism works to put settler colonialism on display and intervene in histories of displacement, it is also wholly rendered necessary by settler colonial logics that construct Palestinian narrators as suspect and indelibly shape what counts as evidence. Turning to questions of pleasure and performance on solidarity tours, this paper also charts the moments when Palestinian tour guides reject performing subjection for the tourist gaze, despite their employment in a profession that treats the performance of subjection as a prerequisite. This paper thus details how solidarity tourists and Palestinian organizers struggle, albeit asymmetrically, to craft a social movement against occupation and land theft despite the epistemic violence and settler logics that structure their encounter.

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