The essay reviews three books that were published consecutively in the last three years, and argues that they represent an important shift in sociology that could potentially reconfigure the ...discipline and the discipline’s theoretical canon. This is because these books make the modern experience of European empires, colonialism, and, in many instances, incomplete decolonization central to sociology. They also question the discipline’s origin narratives and these narratives’ implications in colonial modernity. Thus, the books hold up a mirror reflecting back onto the discipline of sociology its own implication in European empires and colonization and demonstrate how sociology’s imperial episteme continues to shape the discipline today. This article reviews these books and focuses on how they engage in the double task of the deconstruction of sociology’s complicity in empire and the construction of a colonial critique-centered sociology. This is a sociology, the essay argues, which is invested in analyzing structural relations of power in view of the legacies of empire and colonialism. It is also one that asks questions relevant to contemporary realities for the purposes of effecting political change in the world.
This article builds on Indigenous and decolonial theorists’ and activists’ contention that European imperialism and colonialism are inseparable from modern knowledge production, and that the ...power/knowledge nexus continues to be implicated in the contemporary coloniality of the world. It examines the power relations inherent in imperialism and colonialism as they unfolded in the “before,” “during,” and “after” of a research project on Palestinian refugees that was conceptualized and initiated in the Anglo-Irish academy. It asks what kind of research can researchers, who are structurally positioned within the academies of the former/current imperialist powers and their allies, engage in while carrying out research in communities that are on the other end of the imperial and colonial equation. It concludes by discussing what the possibility of a decolonizing research practice in Palestinian refugee communities may begin to look like during the Palestinians’ settler-colonized and stateless present.
One hundred thousand Palestinians fled to Syria after being expelled from Palestine upon the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. Integrating into Syrian society over time, their experience ...stands in stark contrast to the plight of Palestinian refugees in other Arab countries, leading to different ways through which to understand the 1948 Nakba, or catastrophe, in their popular memory.
Conducting interviews with first-, second-, and third-generation members of Syria's Palestinian community, Anaheed Al-Hardan follows the evolution of the Nakba-the central signifier of the Palestinian refugee past and present-in Arab intellectual discourses, Syria's Palestinian politics, and the community's memorialization. Al-Hardan's sophisticated research sheds light on the enduring relevance of the Nakba among the communities it helped create, while challenging the nationalist and patriotic idea that memories of the Nakba are static and universally shared among Palestinians. Her study also critically tracks the Nakba's changing meaning in light of Syria's twenty-first-century civil war.
As too many intellectual histories from the ‘global South’ remain under-explored, this book aims to redress such imbalance. Authors from the region sketch out their perspectives of transformations. ...This includes case studies and accounts from Africa, South Asia, and the Middle East. Taking a critical stance on the ongoing dominance of Eurocentrism in academia, the authors present their contributions in relation to current decolonial challenges.
The 1948 Nakba has, in light of the 1993 Oslo Accords and Palestinian refugee activists' mobilisation around the right of return, taken on a new-found centrality and importance in Palestinian refugee ...communities. Closely-related to this, members of the 'Generation of Palestine', the only individuals who can recollect Nakba memories, have come to be seen as the guardians of memories that are eventually to reclaim the homeland. These historical, social and political realities are deeply rooted in the ways in which the few remaining members of the generation of Palestine recollect 1948. Moreover, as members of communities that were destroyed in Palestine, and whose common and temporal and spatial frameworks were non-linearly constituted anew in Syria, one of the multiples meanings of the Nakba today can be found in the way the refugee communities perceive and define this generation.
The Palestinian Right of Return Movement (RoRM) emerged among diaspora refugee communities following the Oslo accords and the perceived threat to the right of return. This article focuses on the RoRM ...in Syria in the context of the community's history and unique civil rights there. Based on extensive interviews in the Damascus area, it provides an overview of the heterogeneous movement, which, while requiring state approval, operates in an autonomous civil society sphere. RoRM activists translate visions of the return formulated in the Palestinian national arena into local community practices that mobilize memories of Palestine as resources (through oral history, village commemorations, etc.) with the aim of ensuring a future return by the new generation of refugees.
This book brings together an inter-disciplinary group of Palestinian, Israeli, American, British and Irish scholars who theorise 'the question of Palestine'. Critically committed to supporting the ...Palestinian quest for self determination, they present new theoretical ways of thinking about Palestine. These include the 'Palestinization' of ethnic and racial conflicts, the theorization of Palestine as camp, ghetto and prison, the tourist/activist gaze, the role of gendered resistance, the centrality of the memory of the 1948 Nakba (catastrophe) to the contemporary understanding of the conflict, and the historic roots of the contemporary discourse on Palestine. The book offers a novel examination of how the Palestinian experience of being governed under what Giorgio Agamben names a 'state of exception' may be theorised as paradigmatic for new forms of global governance. An indispensable read for any serious scholar.
