Jennifer’s Research Interests:
FIELDS: Palestinian Studies; Ethnic Studies; Feminist Studies; Contemporary Arab & Middle Eastern Studies; Arab American Studies
SUB-FIELDS: revolution; decolonization; resistance; social movements; colonialisms; imperialism; borders; transnational women of color feminisms; critical refugee studies; indigeneity; gendered labor; Marxist thought; neoliberalism; violence
Thawra hatta al-Nasr (Revolution Until Victory) was the most widespread slogan of the Palestinian national liberation movement in the 1960s-80s. Globally, revolutionary figures proudly rehearsed the slogan and as it gained popularity amongst the masses it also gave hope and responsibility to millions of Palestinian refugees. I collect popular experiences, narratives, and opinions of the revolutionary moment in Lebanon, for Palestinian and Lebanese liberation, compiling a people's history of this important moment. My research serves to explore the question of revolution, what it is, how it is defined, and its temporal and spatial confines, ultimately framing stakes and limits of revolution for stateless subjects and its gendered praxis.
My book centers the relationship between the Palestine Liberation Organization and the Lebanese National Movement. This coalition was formed by the time the Lebanese civil war commenced in 1975 and continued until the PLO was evacuated from its Lebanon headquarters in 1982. This book elaborates this formation, its internal dynamics, and the broader implications of Palestinian revolution in Lebanon and for Palestinian refugees. This book at once looks at the ideological and political foundations of the alliance as well as everyday relations and praxis of revolution. Situated within a scale of power struggles locally, regionally, and internationally, this temporal and spatial context illuminates the layered dimensions of struggle through the enactment of revolution and for the aim of liberation.
Further, the book examines the ways counter-revolutionary trappings of nationalist dogma eclipsed possibilities for revolution that accounted for equitable value of gendered labor within anti-colonial struggle. I expand the notion and study of social movements for stateless peoples’, armed struggle and theoretical understandings of violence, deconstructing violence as epistemic and nonbinary at sites where colonialism and imperialism persist.
For a glimpse of what’s to come in my book, check out this Jadaliyya piece I published. For more about my research, check out this interview with UC Davis’ Feminist Research Institute where I was formerly a Visiting Scholar.
* Image Credit: www.palestineposterproject.org