Palestinian Feminist Collective
HEKLER ASSEMBLY: Infrastructures of Care
See full program here.
Session #10 Love Letter to Palestine
When: Mon. December 13, 2021 12-3pm ET
Hosts: Palestinian Feminist Collective - Dena Al-Adeeb, Sarah Ihmoud, and Jennifer Mogannam
On the eve of the Palestinian uprising this past spring, the Palestinian feminist collective (PFC), in conversation with feminists movements on the ground in Palestine, released a public “love letter to our people struggling in Palestine.” The letter emerged as a direct response towith the struggles of Palestinian families to protect their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied Jerusalem from theft and occupation by Zionist settlers, the militarized invasion of our sacred spaces, and yet another military assault on Gaza. It calls for “feminists everywhere to speak up, organize, and join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.”
The call from the PFC’s love letter was amplified and answered by feminist scholars and activists in gender studies departments across the nation, who released a public statement condemning the ongoing assaults on Palestinian land and life, and committing themselves to solidarity with the people of Palestine, as “proud benefactors of decades of feminist anti-racist, and anti-colonial activism that informs the foundation of our interdiscipline. Even the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA) would add its name as a signatory.
This workshop “engages the force of the love letter as a decolonial method and praxis to consider how love can be a radical and infrastructural modality of social change inspiring the reemergence of feminist solidarities between Palestinians and other indigenous communities (Ihmoud forthcoming).” It invites participants to reflect on themes of love, intimacy, care, rebellion and solidarity in envisioning how to cultivate artistic, scholarly and other social praxes to reactivate the PFC's love letter and action toolkit. These offerings illustrate a broader vision for “a radically different future based on life-affirming interconnectedness, empowering the working classes, and love for each other, land, life and the planet itself.”
Session Material:
Palestinian Feminist Collective: “A Love Letter to our People in Palestine”
Palestine Action Toolkit: Freedom Within Reach
Pledge that Palestine is a Feminist Issue
Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed, Chapter 6: "Love as Hermeneutics of Social Change, a Decolonizing Movida" (full text in folder)
Palestine is a Feminist Struggle: Emerging Feminist Organizing from the Homeland to the US (Video)
Love is Our Method for Liberation: Kinship, Care and Abolition in Palestinian Feminist Praxis
REFLECTION
Love Letter to Palestine: Decolonial Love and Feminist Praxis
This work is inspired by our participation in the Palestinian Feminist Collective and HEKLER ASSEMBLY Workshop
Our contribution to Detours is a photo essay and guided workshop that centers the question of love as a decolonizing methodology. It builds on the idea of the love letter as a critical methodology, exploring its possibilities for pushing boundaries of kinship and solidarities across time and space, thinking with the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s “Love Letter for our People Struggling in Palestine” released in May 2021 on the eve of the Unity Intifada (Ihmoud forthcoming). This PFC love letter is a feminist call to action, “to speak up, organize, and join the struggle for Palestinian liberation.” It also proposes a form for engaging oneself with Palestine as praxis (e.g. Joudah et al 2021) across spatial and temporal confines energized by a feminist ethos that envelops a practice of care and shared affect as Palestinians in the struggle globally. The letter emerged as a direct response to the struggles of Palestinian families to protect their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied Jerusalem from theft and occupation by Zionist settlers, the militarized invasion of our sacred spaces, and yet another military assault on Gaza.
Inspired by the collaboration between PFC and Hekler, which manifested through a workshop in December 2021, we reactivate the love letter to uplift Palestinian liberation and welcome submissions, created through this contribution in Detours, to our ongoing project aimed at publishing a compilation of works. Our contribution to Detours is three parts: First is a photo essay that contextualizes and theorizes PFC’s love letter as a method of decolonial praxis. Second, is a workshop facilitation that asks participants to connect with the love letter, situate the self and positionality, and enable creation. Lastly, through these prompts we invite readers to write a love letter to Palestine or produce other creative works that embody the themes present in the love letter, including, but not limited to, love, affect, care, rebellion and joint-struggle - asking readers to be active participants in a decolonizing methodology of love.
CALLS TO ACTION
Call for Solidarity and Action
Strike MoMA/Free Palestine: A Call to Action, Letter hosted by Social Text blog
Palestinian Museum: The Digital Archive (PMDA) is a signature project of the Palestinian Museum that scouts, digitizes, and archives endangered resources documenting Palestinian micro-histories from 1800 to the present day.
The Palestine Poster Project Archives
Palestine Solidarity Campaign: Postcard Project:
https://palestinecampaign.org/resources/leaflets-flyers/
https://palestinecampaign.eaction.online/petition/Hancock
HOSTS
Dena Al-Adeeb is an Iraqi born transnational artist, scholar, educator, cultural worker, and a mother. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of American Studies at the University of California, Davis and Mellon Artist and Practitioner Fellow at the Yale Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration. Dena investigates the relationship between the aesthetics, poetics, and politics of social and organizational processes of militarization, forced displacement, and globalization, as they manifest through collective memory. She creates performative, relational works, dedicated to participatory art, socially engaged projects, and collaborative engagement. Linktree.
Sara Ihmoud is a Chicana-Palestinian anthropologist whose work takes Palestine and Palestinian diaspora as sites from which to explore questions of race and ethnicity, gender violence, colonialism, Indigenous politics and borders/borderlands in comparative and transnational perspectives. She is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the College of the Holy Cross. She is currently working on her first book, "Almaqdasiyya: Palestinian Feminism and the Decolonial Imaginary".
Jennifer Mogannam is a UC President’s postdoctoral fellow in the departments of Anthropology and Gender, Sexuality, & Women’s Studies at UC Davis and earned her Ph.D. in Ethnic Studies from UC San Diego. Jennifer is a critical, cross-disciplinary scholar and educator of Palestinian and Arab transnational movements, third world solidarities, gendered power in anti-colonial struggle, and violence and revolution. She has organized in Palestinian and Arab American community spaces for over 15 years, most recently with the Palestinian Feminist Collective.