STEVEN SALAITA /// Languages of Colonialism and Resistance in Palestine

This conversation between Shivangi Mariam Raj and Steven Salaita reflects over Palestine by examining how settler colonial logics are coded within language — ranging from the limits of human rights framework to conditional solidarities, from visual grammars of sanitized victimhood to academic censorship, and more. We also discuss the defiant vocabulary of resistance, as embodied by Palestinian armed rebels, prisoners, and scholars. Steven Salaita is a Palestinian scholar and public speaker based in the U.S. He has previously taught at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater and Virginia Tech. He is the author of several books, including “Anti-Arab Racism in the USA: Where it Comes From and What it Means for Politics Today” (Pluto Press, 2006), "Holy Land in Transit: Colonialism and the Quest for Canaan" (Syracuse University Press, 2006), "Arab American Literary Fictions, Cultures, and Politics" (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), "The Uncultured Wars: Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought - New Essays" (Zed Books, 2008), "Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader's Guide" (Syracuse University Press, 2011), "Israel's Dead Soul" (Temple University Press, 2011), "Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom" (Haymarket Books, 2015), "Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine" (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), and "We Could Be Free: Palestine in the Revolutionary Imagination" (Haymarket Books, 2019), among others.