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A talk by Dr Abdel Razzaq Takriti for the Global Middle East Seminar Series
About this Event
Kurdistan, Palestine, and the Politics and Poetics of Solidarity
Today, a resurgence of calls for racial and anti-colonial justice is accompanied by genuine interest in internationalist solidarity. Yet, modes of thought and practice that cross-national, ethnic, and racial boundaries have been historically strained by appeals to realpolitik within the Afro-Asian arena, and by a sustained discursive assault rooted in pessimistic, and ultimately atomized, politics of victimhood emanating out of the global north. This talk sheds light on often overlooked aspects of Palestinian-Kurdish solidarity. Reflecting on the historic bonds that tied two major Middle Eastern communities of struggle, it engages with collective revolutionary trajectories as well as individual relationships exemplified by the intimate friendship between the eminent Syrian Kurdish writer Salim Barakat and the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. In probing the connections that facilitated- and the contradictions that undermined- solidarity in the past, it highlights the indispensability of reviving, and all the while creatively reconstituting, traditions of affiliation rooted in universalist practices and visions of liberation.
Abdel Razzaq Takriti is Associate Professor, Arab-American Educational Foundation Chair in Modern Arab History, and Founding Director of the Arab-American Educational Foundation Center for Arab Studies at the University of Houston. A scholar of anti-colonial revolutions, he is the author of Monsoon Revolution: Republicans, Sultans, and Empires in Oman, 1965-1976 (Oxford University Press, 2013 and 2016), and co-author and co-curator, with Karma Nabulsi, of The Palestinian Revolution website [4].