Laleh Khalili
Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies
University of Exeter

If you’ll be attending the Royal Geographical Society (with IBG) annual international conference in London, please join us (either in-person or virtually) for the 2024 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture, “Where is Palestine? Singapore on the Med, Spaceships, and the Mount of Olives”, presented by Prof. Laleh Khalili on Wednesday 28th August (4:50pm-6:30pm BST) in the Ondaatje Theatre.

Abstract: On 13 October 2023, the Royal Geographical Society cancelled a long-planned Palestinian literature festival on their premises, citing infelicitous risk assessments, “security advice” about the safety of the historic building and those “in and around” it, arising from unspecified but sinister “such disorder”. The irony of denying space to a people dispossessed of space and place by Israeli settler colonialism was not lost on the many hundreds of geographers who wrote to protest this decision. Where is Palestine? Where can Palestine be? In this lecture, I want to consider the place of Palestine not just in the imaginaries of the colonisers and those who support them, but as a place of struggle, persistence, resistance, and flourishing.

Palestinian spaces have acted as a signifier and a symbol—of Old and New Testament sites of projection of piety; of destinations for ethnonationalist longings; as an outpost of European civilisation against the Asian hordes; of a villa in the jungle. Palestine has been portrayed as an empty space primed to receive settlers; a desert made to bloom; a malarial swamp drained and made productive. Israeli officials have at various times fantasised about Palestinians being pushed into the sea or the desert; or being expelled to a reclaimed offshore space—a Singapore on the Med—or even to the moon. Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour’s short film, A Space Exodus (2008), can be seen as an artistic response to this latter malignant Israeli desire.

Palestinians have in turn imagined and enacted Palestine in myriad ways to reclaim it as theirs, and as a site of living and flourishing. I will focus in particular on five different Palestinian spaces: the hills of Galilee and Nablus; the sea at Gaza and Haifa; the Mount of Olives; the desert at Naqab; and on the refugee camps in the shatat. This talk draws on the works of Palestinian geographers, poets, writers, artists, and filmmakers, and responds to the call of the International Critical Geographies Group. I will speak of Palestine, and these places specifically not only as sites of memory, desire, and dreams, but also as places where through swimming, walking, storytelling, picnicking, protesting, farming, working, and resisting, Palestinians again and again reproduce their Palestine.

Laleh Khalili is Al-Qasimi Professor of Gulf Studies in the Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter. Laleh’s book Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (Verso, 2020) will be well known readers of the journal: it must be among the works most frequently cited in Antipode’s pages. As its publishers describe it, it is “the story of what the making of new ports and shipping infrastructure has meant not only for the Arabian peninsula itself, but for the region and the world beyond. The book is an account of how maritime transportation is not simply an enabling companion of trade, but central to the very fabric of global capitalism. The ports that serve maritime trade, logistics, and hydrocarbon transport create racialised hierarchies of labour, engineer the lived environment, aid the accumulation of capital regionally and globally, and carry forward colonial regimes of profit, law and administration.”

Sinews of War and Trade was preceded by a volume edited with Jillian Schwedler, Policing and Prisons in the Middle East: Formations of Coercion (Hurst, 2010) and two monographs, Time in the Shadows: Confinement in Counterinsurgencies (Stanford University Press, 2013) and Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge University Press, 2007), and has now been followed by the hot-off-the-press The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (MACK, 2024). From the titles alone one can clearly see the threads running through Laleh’s work—activist scholarship “curious about the workings of transnational movements: of colonial forms of power and violence, of resistance, of ideas and practices, of people, of capital and cargo”. It’s work “fascinated by both the ongoing violence of empire and the afterlives of colonialism in contemporary politics”, and it could not be more timely. There are few, if any, articles in a list going back 20 years (and including pieces in venues such as the Middle East Report and London Review of Books) that don’t strike one as pressing, as have something vital to offer thinking through (and beyond) our present moment.

Here at Antipode we think that Prof. Khalili is among the most important and interesting voices speaking in the field today, and we are absolutely thrilled that she will be presenting the 2024 Antipode RGS-IBG Lecture. We would be delighted if you could join us, either online or in the RGS Ondaatje Theatre, for it. Those who cannot attend on Wednesday 28th August (4:50pm-6:30pm BST) will be able to watch later, either thorough the RGS or here at http://antipodeonline.org/

In anticipation of the what we know will be a inspiring event, we would like to point readers towards two sets of recently commissioned essays—on pro-Palestinian and anti-war protest on campus and the ongoing Palestinian genocide, respectively—and an archive of peer-reviewed articles published in Antipode on the history, current condition, and possible futures of Palestine and Israel.

Many thanks, again, from Antipode’s Editorial Collective and the Antipode Foundation’s board of trutees to Laleh for agreeing to join us in London, and to our publishers at Wiley and the brilliant team at the RGS for all their help making the lecture happen.

The Antipode Editorial Collective, August 2024