Junior Research Fellow, 2018-2020
Olive
Olive is a book about 21st century settler-colonialism. Specifically, it connects displacement, land conquest, and memory with the politics of everyday survival for Palestinians located in Palestine and the West, through the optic of the olive. Through multi-sited ethnography, I trace the olive from the moment it is harvested in the West Bank to its circulation to the West—linking the West Bank to olive destination sites like San Francisco—in order to analyze what is enabled by market inclusion for indigenous people, and the violence that is muted in the process. I also conduct close readings of cultural texts including cookbooks, labels, advertisement literature, and brochures for olive commodities, in order to analyze the relationships between neoliberal market inclusion, displacement and memory, and Western settler colonialisms.