This paper seeks to destabilize the silent privilege given to the secured juridical-political position of the citizen as the stable site of enunciation of the problem/solution framework under which the stranger (foreigner, immigrant, refugee) is theoretically located. By means of textual, intertextual, and extratextual readings of Antigone, the paper argues that it is politically and literarily possible to (re)invent her for strangers in the twenty-first century, that is, for those symbolically produced as not-legally locatable and who resignify their ambivalent ontological (...) status between life and death as an alternative sociopolitical location of speech and action in equality with “others.”. (shrink)

This reflection on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and peoples was inspired by the current ferment in critical indigenous and native studies, and now Palestinian studies, about settler colonialism. Tracing the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination emerging through indigenous activism, the essay reflects on museums and contested rituals of liberal recognition in North America and Australia to highlight both the stark differences in the situations of Palestinians under Israeli (...) rule and the radical significance of the recent efflorescence of Palestinian cultural projects. Focusing particularly on the history of the Palestinian Museum (that opened in Birzeit in 2016), the article argues that the productivity of the settler-colonial framework lies less in the way it maps directly onto the situation on the ground than in the new solidarities it engenders and its potential to burst open the Palestinian political imagination. (shrink)

In this essay, I explore the city of Jerusalem, which not only lies at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict but is inextricably shaped by its developments. Nominally unified under Israeli sovereignty, Jerusalem nevertheless remains starkly divided between an Israeli west and an occupied Palestinian east and is best understood as a frontier city characterized by long-simmering tensions and quotidian conflict. With its future tied to the future of the conflict, Jerusalem remains caught between two options: the almost global preference (...) for the city’s repartition in accordance with a ‘two-state solution’ and the Israeli desire to maintain the status quo. A closer look at contemporary Jerusalem, however, reveals the untenability of both options. In this essay, I seek to document how the reality of Israeli-Palestinian division sits alongside a dynamic of blurred separation in the city, which has forged an uneasy coexistence of sorts. Re-thinking the frontier as a site of both conflict and coexistence, I argue, is key to imagining future possibilities for the city that do not rest on the desire for ethnically-pure spaces, but are rather guided by a politics of co-presence that recognizes the impossibility of disentangling Arab and Jewish histories, memories and connections to the city. (shrink)