Museums and Recognition Politics in Settler-Colonial States: Towards Palestinian Alter/natives

In collaboration with the Master Programme in Israeli Studies
and the Bachelor Programme of Contemporary Visual Art at Birzeit University
Speaker: Dr. Lila Abu-Lughod
Wednesday, 9 May | 14:00 

Abu-Lughod will reflect on Palestine’s political impasses in relation to the experiences of other colonized places and people, inspired by current debates in critical indigenous and native studies about settler colonialism in places like Australia and North America. Her lecture focusses on the promises and pitfalls of new imaginations of sovereignty and self-determination that are emerging in indigenous activism and how they relate to the politics of museums. Through a journey that will take us to key museums and to rituals marking recognition and apology around the world, she ends by raising questions about how we might interpret the current emergence of Palestinian cultural projects like the Palestinian Museum. Can the settler colonial framework burst open the Palestinian political imagination?

The talk will be in English with availability of interpretation.