Kareem Rabie: Palestine, China, and the Ends of Globalization
This talk is an introduction to ongoing research on contemporary human and economic geographies in, and in-between, the West Bank and China. Beginning with a focus on small commodity exchange between Palestinians in Yiwu and in the West Bank, it attempts to understand changing forms of community and national identification among Palestinians, the impact that mechanisms governing free trade have on them, and what commodity circulation and capital flows may have to do with the occupation. It combines ethnographic fieldwork in Palestine and China with historical accounts of Palestinian state building after the Oslo Accords and labor patterns among port workers under the British Mandate. It ends by scaling up towards an account of general forms of connection and disconnection as matters of culture, politics, overproduction, and the state.
The lecture will be live-streamed on Zoom here.
Kareem Rabie is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank, was published by Duke University Press in 2021. His current research focuses on the complex social, economic, and imaginative geographies between the West Bank and China.
This event is free and open to the public. It is organized by LaGuardia Community College and cosponsored by CPCP.
