Aesthetics and Politics Lecture Series
Gaza forces us to ask questions that challenge our assumptions of not only what defines or qualifies a settler colonial city, but also the relationship of indigeneity to the urban. It provides us with an opening to place indigenous lives in an urban landscape born of indigenous history, not of colonial settlement. Gaza’s decades under siege highlight the unique forms that settler colonial elimination can take, herding and kettling – confining Palestinians – all the while witnessing them grow and build a city, despite ongoing domination of a settler colonial state. The genocide of this last year has propelled these lessons to new levels and created a model for future Israeli violence across the Palestinian landscape, both urban and rural. In this talk, Prof. Joudah opens for conversation these eliminatory models to come as Palestinians in Gaza continue to live through a genocide.
Nour Joudah is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Asian American Studies at UCLA and a former President’s and Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Geography at UC-Berkeley (2022-23). Dr. Joudah completed her PhD in Geography at UCLA (2022), and wrote her dissertation Mapping Decolonized Futures: Indigenous Visions for Hawaii and Palestine on the efforts by Palestinian and native Hawaiian communities to imagine and work toward liberated futures while centering indigenous duration as a non-linear temporality. Her work examines mapping practices and indigenous survival and futures in settler states, highlighting how indigenous countermapping is a both cartographic and decolonial praxis. She also has a MA in Arab Studies from Georgetown University, and wrote her MA thesis on the role and perception of exile politics within the Palestinian liberation struggle, in particular among politically active Palestinian youth living in the United States and occupied Palestine.