Geographies of Boycott: Palestine and anti-colonial Marxism
Dr. Hashem Abushama (Oxford)
Monday 18th March 2025, 3pm
Mathematical Sciences, Lecture Room 106
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
Thinking with Fanon and Gramsci, this paper foregrounds practices of cultural boycott across the map of historic Palestine as an entry point into thinking about resistance against colonial violence. Inspired by Gramsci’s methodological formulations on consent, coercion, and political and civil society, the paper theorises boycotts as an arena of elaboration for an embodied spatialization of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. It thinks with Stuart Hall and his expansion of Gramsci’s formulations to make sense of notions of cultural resistance. The paper insists on reading the boycott as a spatio-temporal practice that enables a critique of Israeli settler colonialism, Palestinian nationalism, and class politics in Palestine. In doing so, I think about the antagonism between the colonizer and the colonized as one that is mediated through spatial difference and the multiple axes of social difference (gender, race, and class). There is already a Fanonian refusal at play here; colonial violence should not be seen as overdetermining and encompassing to the complexities of the social life of the colonized, but as historically produced by and through these complexities.
As part of "Critical Theory, Critical Practice" Seminar Series of the Power, Space, and Cultural Change (PSCC) Research Cluster
