Immersive Revolts: Palestinian Resistance in Late Stage Empire

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

How can we analyze and animate the visual representations of resistance and revolt for Palestinian liberation in the colonial present through a decolonial feminist lens? How does the figure of the poet, the revolutionary, and the political prisoner embody sumud -- an Arabic word for “steadfastness” that has come to mean sustained revolt in the Palestinian context? To answer these questions, our roundtable explores the intersections of gender, revolt, solidarity, iconography and affect through decolonial feminist epistemologies. Anchoring our reflections is the Phoenix of GazaVR Exhibit, a project that emerged out of Palestinian scholar Naim Aburaddi’s yearning to feel, touch, smell, and relive his cherished memories in Gaza. After being away from Gaza for six years, Naim worked with Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb and together they launched the GazaVR project, an immersion in Gazan life before the post-October 2023 genocidal invasion.

With GazaVR as a base for our discussion, this roundtable reflects on the intellectual, political, and revolutionary potential of centering Palestinian art, digital media and transnational feminist solidarity in confronting empire. We read the digital and the poetic as the grounds to challenge late stage U.S. empire in its current iteration of fascistic, colonial, white supremacy. Drawing on our distinct yet interconnected intellectual and political commitments, we elucidate how our work exists in dialogue with Gazan art and the poetics of resistance. We spearhead this conversation, even as we hold a deep sense of grief during an ongoing genocidal rupture. Our dialogue is part of a series of conversations and exhibits on decolonial feminist art and research, as we continually center revolutionary women in their engagements with Palestine. Through these revolutionaries’ work, the panelists link Viet Nam, Palestine, Japan, and Black America as critical sites of feminist geography and revolution.

Ahlam discusses the meaning behind the Phoenix of Gaza project. Rana centers digital poetics as a world-making project. Looking at Black, Indigenous, and Palestinian movement work including public panel discussions and podcasts, Rana reflects on the mode and medium of the digital as a decolonial exercise that lifts revolutionary interconnectedness. Lan will discuss Viet Nam and Palestine, their past and present ties, focusing specifically on Viet Nam’s relation to Israel today as well as forms of solidarity through art and other campaigns within the Vietnamese diaspora. If the struggle for revolution united Viet Nam and Palestine in the 1960s, now the anti-war/pro-Palestine protests across university campuses have also connected these histories. Lila’s contribution addresses the complex and layered process of revolutionary thought and practice at this stage of U.S. empire and considers the meanings of revolution during ongoing genocide. Setsu discusses representations of armed resistance and Japanese freedom fighters who gave their lives for Palestinian liberation. Jennifer situates the decades-long history of Palestinian resistance in its various forms and how it reveals the function of gendered labor in revolutionary struggle. In so doing, together we raise the importance of revolutionary art and aesthetics in sustaining the affective power of anticolonial resistance.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Setsu Shigematsu, UC Riverside

Panelists

• Lila A Sharif, Arizona State University-Tempe

• Rana A. Sharif, University of California-Berkeley

• Ahlam Muhtaseb, California State University, San Bernard

• Lan Duong, University of Southern California

• Jennifer Mogannam, University of California, Santa Cruz

Biographical Information

Lila Sharif is a Palestinian writer, educator, researcher, poet and scholar based in the Phoenix area. Her research is located at the intersection of critical refugee studies, global feminism, and Indigenous studies of Southwest Asia with an emphasis on the food, land, epistemologies, and ecologies of Palestine. Sharif won the ASA’s best essay prize in 2024 for her essay “On Sophicide”. She has co-authored Departures (UC Press, 2021) along with Dr. Lan Duong and the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Her recent publications include a comparative study of Palestinian and Vietnamese cinema, an analysis of Gazan food as a site of feminist struggle during genocide, the afterlives of the War on Terror, and a global intersectional approach to analyzing race and the environment. Most recently, Sharif co-edited Detours: A Decolonial Guidebook of Palestine with Jennifer Jelly and Somdeep Sen, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book Olive Skins (University of Minnesota Press) analyzes the ways in which erasure and recognition inform Palestinian life, and how Palestinian women continue to mediate the relationship between the Palestinian people and their homeland, through everyday food practices, the transmission of memory, and the everyday work of Return.

Lan Duong is Associate Professor in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California. She is the author of Treacherous Subjects: Gender, Culture, and Trans-Vietnamese Feminism, coeditor of Troubling Borders: Southeast Asian Women in the Diaspora, and cowriter of Departures: An Introduction to Critical Refugee Studies. Dr. Duong’s second book project, Transnational Vietnamese Cinemas and the Archives of Memory, examines Vietnamese films across history and institutional and community-oriented archival sites. Her book of poems, Nothing Follows, was published by Texas Tech University Press in 2023. She is a founding member of the Critical Refugee Studies Collective (www.criticalrefugeestudies.com).

Jennifer Mogannam is an Assistant Professor in the department of Critical Race & Ethnic studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is also a UC-Mellon Humanities Initiative early faculty fellow and affiliate faculty with the Center for the Middle East and North Africa. She is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar of Palestinian and Arab transnational movements, third world solidarities, violence, refuge, and revolution. Her current book project centers and analyzes the coalitional formation between the Palestinian revolution and Lebanese opposition coalition during the Lebanese civil war.

Dr. Ahlam Muhtaseb is a professor of media studies at California State University, San Bernardino (CSUSB) and a senior data justice fellow with Princeton's Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab. She is the recipient of the 2024 Women Support Organization’s Distinguished Woman of the Year award and the 2024 Activism and Social Justice Scholarly Influence Award by the National Communication Association’s (NCA’s) Activism and Social Justice Division. She is also the recipient of the 2020 CSUSB Outstanding Scholarship, Research and Creative Activities Award and the 2019-20 Outstanding Research and Creative Activity Faculty Mentor Award. In 2019, she won the Rebuilding Alliance “Story Teller” Award. She co-produced and co-directed the documentary 1948: Creation & Catastrophe, winner of the Jerusalem International Film Festival’s 2019 Special Jury Award in the Feature Documentary category. She is the co-founder and director of the Gaza VR/XReal project: The Phoenix of Gaza. Her research interests include digital communication, digital resistance & decolonization, social justice, and diasporic communities. She is working currently on a study of Palestinian digital resistance and decolonizing digital spaces.

Rana A. Sharif (she/her/هي) is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is also an independent research fellow with the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and a Race and Digital Justice Fellow. Her research is located at the intersection of the humanities and emerging technologies, including new and digital media. In her work she explores narratology in the digital age. Her current book project advances a theory of Palestinian digital poetics illustrating how technomediated media invite a decolonial feminist literary reading practice. This practice in reading is grounded in indigenous survivance, refusal, and narration through the mode and medium of the digitally enabled and communal archives. In addition to her academic work, she is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and co-hosts and produces shows and podcasts as part of Pacifica Radio’s SWANA Region Radio/Radio Intifada.

Setsu Shigematsu is Professor of media and cultural studies at UC Riverside. Her current research focuses on the last half-century of Japanese internationalist revolutionary actions for Palestinian liberation and against U.S. military empire. Setsu’s research focuses on gendered state violence, comparative feminisms, and transnational liberation movements. A feminist abolitionist filmmaker, xe directed and produced Ghosts of Adelanto: the Rise of Abolish ICE (2025) and Visions of Abolition: From Critical Resistance to a New Way of Life (2011/2021), a documentary film about the rise of the prison industrial complex and the prison abolition movement (www.visionsofabolition.org).