Invited to witness: Solidarity Tourism across occupied palestine

My book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023, in print and open-access), is a multi-sited ethnographic study of solidarity tourism in Palestine. Situating Palestine as a central site of inquiry for feminist studies, critical ethnic studies, and transnational American studies, I analyze the relationships between race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation function in tandem. I use the term solidarity tourism to refer to forms of travel that are animated by a desire on the part of tour guides to cultivate solidarity with their cause and tourists’ desire to establish a deeper connection to a particular social movement. Drawing from participant observation of solidarity tours across Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, I explore what happens when tourism understands itself as solidarity and when solidarity functions through modalities of tourism. I argue that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as a fraught localized political strategy, and an emergent industry, through which Palestinian organizers refashion conventional tourism to the region by extending deliberately truncated invitations to tourists to come to Palestine and witness the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. I describe the invitation as a genre, marked by the repetition of certain conventions, and I theorize who the invitation is for, what it is meant to do, and how those subjects we understand as “toured” redefine the invitation in order to confront and resist settler-colonial contexts that are nowhere near “settled.” I also detail the conditions that have led Palestinians to make their case through solidarity tourism in the first place, describing the ways in which tourists travel to Palestine to see the effects of Israeli occupation for themselves despite the volumes of literature Palestinians have produced on their own condition. this way, Invited to Witness shows how Palestinian organizers, under the constraints of military occupation, and in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, wrest both the capacity to invite and, in Edward Said’s words, “the permission to narrate” from Israeli control.

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine
(Duke University Press)

Call for Contributors

Editors:

Lila Adib Sharif (University of Illinois - Urbana Champaign)

Jennifer Lynn Kelly (University of California - Santa Cruz) 

Somdeep Sen (Roskilde University)

Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine is a co-edited volume in the “Detours” series of alternative guide books published by Duke University Press. This interdisciplinary project will use a decolonial praxis to approach and upend the guidebook genre. Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine will showcase how Palestinians across Palestine and in the diaspora reshape forms of tourism to their homeland in order to lay a claim to it in the midst of Israel’s settler colonial project. As a collaborative and co-edited volume, Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine provides a window into the creative, nuanced, and complex work of Palestinian solidarity tour guides, scholars, artists, writers, and activists. For this volume on displacement, anti-colonial forms of rethinking and redistributing space in Palestine, and the role of tourism in both, we seek contributions that include (but are not limited to) anti-colonial tour itineraries, visual cartographies, satiric postcards, artwork, literary prose, redrawn maps, poetry, original lyrics, de/anti-colonial culinary narratives, collages, cartoons, and narrative essays about the everyday manifestations and impacts of tourism, militarism, and colonialism. The questions that guide us in this project are: in Palestine, where tourism animates and inundates the entire landscape, how do Palestinians subject to displacement and exile reclaim tourism and its forms to work against colonialism? What do these initiatives look like? What do they produce? What knowledge do they impart to the tourist, pedagogically and otherwise? And how do those who do this work understand their labor and its effects? Furthermore, how else can one imagine a decolonial “tour” of Palestine? In posing these questions, we aim to collect diverse materials that highlight themes of return, loss, survivance, cultural identity, activism, art, poetry and literature, memory, family history, knowledge of place, connection to land, ritual, storytelling, and beyond. Submission should be written in clear prose for a general reader, no more than 3000 words maximum, and with no more than 10 citations. Per Duke University Press guidelines, digital art files should be at least 1500 pixels on the longest edge and charts, graphs, diagrams, and maps must be created in Adobe Illustrator.

Deadlines:

250 Word Abstract or Proposal Due          December 15, 2021

First Draft of Submissions Due                  February 15, 2022

Expected Publication Date                         Fall  2023

Please send submissions and queries to detourspalestine@gmail.com.

COURSES

UnIVERSity of California, Santa Cruz

Spring 2024

FMST 145: Racial and Gender Formations in the U.S.
Feminist Studies Department

Winter 2024

CRES 190: Senior Exit Seminar: Solidarity
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

CRES 100: Comparative Theories in Race and Ethnicity
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

Spring 2023

FMST 194/CRES 190: Senior Exit Seminar: Comparative Settler Colonial Studies
Feminist Studies Department and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department

Winter 2023

FMST 20: Feminism and Social Justice
Feminist Studies Department

Spring 2021

FMST 194/CRES 190: Senior Exit Seminar: Comparative Settler Colonial Studies
Feminist Studies Department and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program

CRES 101: Research Methods and Writing in Critical Race and Ethnic Studies
Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program

Fall 2020

FMST 145: Racial and Gender Formations in the U.S.
Feminist Studies Department

Spring 2019

FMST 145: Racial and Gender Formations in the U.S.
Feminist Studies Department

FMST 194/CRES 190: Senior Exit Seminar: Touring War and Empire
Feminist Studies Department and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program

Winter 2019

FMST/CRES 218: Graduate Seminar: Militarism and Tourism
Feminist Studies Department and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Spring 2017

AAS 100: Introduction to Asian American Studies
Departments of Asian American Studies and Gender and Women's Studies

Dickinson College

Spring 2014     

AMS 200-03: Queer Studies
Departments of American Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies

University of Texas at Austin

Spring 2013    

AMS 311S: American Empire
Department of American Studies

Summer 2011

Teaching Assistant, AMS 356: Main Currents in American Studies, 1865-Present
Department of American Studies

2010-2011       

Instructor, RHE 309K: The Rhetoric of Race and Gender
Department of Rhetoric and Writing

2009-2010       

Instructor, RHE 306: Introduction to Rhetoric
Department of Rhetoric and Writing

TALKS, PRESENTATIONS, & Interviews

Email

jlkelly@ucsc.edu