Palestine, Latin America and the Caribbean: Encounters, Crossings, Parallels. Part II

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

The distance between Palestine, Latin America and the Caribbean is shrinking. In recent years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in exploring the intersections of Palestine and Latin America/Caribbean Studies. While this has a lot to do with exploring centuries of Palestinian migration to the Americas, it also is critically linked to shared legacies of settler colonialism, developmentalism, indigeneity, artistic and literary expression, and so on. This trend is also evident in Chicano/a Studies in the US and the emergence of a growing body of scholarship about the vivid geopolitical similarities between the US/Mexico borderlands and the so-called Green Line in Palestine, on the one hand, and the common colonial and racist logic that undergirds the expanding structure of Walls across the US-Mexico border and Wall and the Separation Apartheid Wall in Palestine. How does Palestine Studies engage with Latin America and the Caribbean in this framework is a key question that this double-session seeks to answer.
Interdisciplinary, cross-regional, comparative and trans-historical, this double session sets out to create a joint platform for a critical multivalent and multidirectional dialogue between Palestine, Latin America and the Caribbean. Crossing the borders of area studies, but mindful of distinct regional histories, we aim at investigating the following questions: How do we study parallels in political and social movement organizing? How does scholarship informed by a common ground of global solidarity engage with regional, geographical historical differences? What do travel accounts inform us about unexamined histories of migration routes and diaspora archives? How do current translation practices between Arabic, Spanish and indigenous languages map new literary topographies? What archives and/or ethnographic sites must be examined in order to understand parallel models of colonial state control and militarization links?
To facilitate a dialogue between interlocutors, these questions will be addressed in a double-session of exchange and encounter. While the first session will focus on how emerging scholarship from Palestine engages with Latin America and the Caribbean, the second session will be dedicated to the many forms in which Latin America and the Caribbean have engaged with Palestine.

Sub Track

• Invited Sessions

Session Organizer

• Amal Eqeiq, Williams College

Chair

• Amal Eqeiq, Williams College

Discussant

• Linda E Quiquivix, Community Scholar

Individual Presentations

• Facing the Wall: From Tijuana to Palestine - Gilberto Conde, El Colegio de México

• Counterinsurgent Enclosure from Israel to Latin America - Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn, Yale University

• 1848, 1887, 1898, 1948 and 2018: The Past as Present - Rosaura Sánchez, University of Carlifornia, San Diego; Beatrice Pita, University of California, San Diego

• The Cuban Poster and Palestine: Internationalism and Solidarity Embodied in Images - Carlos Fernando López de la Torre

• The Arab Community of Cuba: The Case of Palestinians from the Past to the Present - Rigoberto Menéndez Paredes