The Feminist and Gender Studies Department presents “Colonialism in Transit, A Teach-In” with Hailey Corkery, Oscar Glassman, and Ramah Aleryan on Friday November 8, 2019 from 4-5:30 at Sacred Grounds.
Hailey Corkery’s teach-in focuses on the political implications of North American birthright trips to Israel. It explores these consequences by examining the curriculum of as well as the motivations and funding behind birthright. The ultimate goal of this teach-in is to foster productive discussion amongst the Colorado College student body about how birthright is not, as many believe, “just a free trip” and how we as a community can combat its harmful ramifications.
In the U.S., allegations of antisemitism have become one major way in which Muslim or/and Arab public figures are vilified and produced as threatening and hateful. In Oscar Glassman’s teach-in he will trace a brief history of the term focusing on its relation to other forms of racism, Zionism, and the state of Israel. What political work does this discourse on the “new antisemitism” do? How does it utilize antiracist language to racialize others? At a time when colonial white nationalism, including antisemitism, is swelling once again in the U.S. and Palestinian lives continue to be made less livable while Palestinian deaths are deemed ungrievable, Jews must become clearer on what antisemitism is and what “never again” means.
Ramah Aleryan is looking at experiences of displacement and the process of belonging and re-belonging for Syrians, on the refugee statues, in the Norweigan and the Lebanese contexts. How does different states approach “integration”? What does “integration” mean for postcolonial subjects both in the Middle East and in European Contexts? As bombs falling from Russian and Turkish warcraft on Syria currently, the topic is more relevant than ever. Both the conflict and the treatment of displaced individuals are the continuation of colonization and rendering the lives of people of color and people from the global south disposable.