Neoliberalism, Security, and the Afro-Arab International

Race and the Politics of Pilgrimage for African American Christians in Palestine and Israel

“…Pilgrims, in other words, "look for places that will make [their] beliefs come alive" (Bajc 2006, p. 102). For the African American Christian travelers in this study, collective memory carries important racial significance in Israel and Palestine, as contemporary African American Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land carry and invoke legacies of Black-Jewish (Chireau and Deutsch 2000; Dorman 2013) and Afro-Arab (Feldman 2015;Fischbach 2018;Lubin 2014) spiritual connections and political solidarities.…”

Race, Religion, and Global Solidarities: W. E. B. Du Bois and “The Black Church” as a Contested Category

“…While this analysis focuses on contemporary movements within Black churches aimed at forging solidarities in Palestine and Israel, it does so in light of historical antecedents linking African American Christians with Israel and Palestine as a site of contested national, religious, and political identities that has connections with racial politics in the United States. For African American Christians working on Palestinian solidarity, these antecedents include the significance of Cold War era racial ideologies linking Israel and the United States (Feldman 2015), the profusion of connections between Black Power activists and Palestinians in transnational frameworks for expanding civil rights activism following the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War (Fischbach 2018), the 20th century exchanges linking African American political thought with emerging struggles for national identity and recognition in the Middle East (Lubin 2014), and more recent articulations of not just parallel but linked experiences of the colonial nature of racism (Davis 2016). For African American Christian Zionists, connections to Israel and Palestine draw on the prominent place of the emancipatory biblical Exodus narrative in Black churches (Glaude 2000;Raboteau 1978), broader African American identification-both with and as-the Jewish people (Chireau and Deutsch 2000; Dorman 2013), and lessons from intersecting moments of conflict and cooperation between American Jews and African Americans within U.S. labor and civil rights activism (Greenberg 2006;Salzman and West 1997).…”

Toward Vocabularies of Liberation

“…His reading of insurgent art forms across the greater Middle East, South Asia, and its diasporas as making "intimate what is rendered distant, tactile what is made invisible, and unifies what is divided" at once gives body to groups that are often rendered as abstract by centering their lived experiences and offers a contemporary model for forming alliances based on shared positionality rather than particular context (Kapadia 2019, 9). Looking at Black Palestinian solidarities further fleshed this out (Lubin 2014;Bailey 2015;Burris 2019) and brought home how even individual practice, be it art or speech, can resist totalizing narratives.…”