Becoming Black, Becoming Palestinian
When
Campus Location
Office/Remote Location
Description
Zahi Zalloua, Dept. of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies, Whitman College—In the first pages of The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois meditates on the question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” What makes the question troubling is its ontological quality: what is foregrounded as a problem is not a set of circumstances but being itself. In my talk, I consider how becoming Black or becoming Palestinian transforms you into a particular kind of object: a phobic object, a criminalizable object, or even a genocidable object. These forms of objecthood mark the violent ways racialization and colonial domination structure white ontology, the very grammar of being. Yet alongside these imposed forms, I also imagine objecthood otherwise, not only as a sign of depletion or loss, but as a site of cross-racial solidarity, a militant call for ontological upheavals and psychic divestments, and a refusal of the world’s partitions of being and nonbeing at home and across the globe.
Price
Free
Admission Information
Open to the public
External Sponsor
UNLV Dept. of Philosophy, UNLV Students for Justice in Palestine, UNLV Muslim Students Association