Towers of Ivory and Steel: How Israeli Universities Deny Palestinian Freedom by Maya Wind considers Israeli universities’ relationship to and advancement of the Israeli government’s policies of apartheid and displacement against Palestinians. Through this study, Wind seeks to discredit two oft-cited arguments about Israeli universities: first, that they are paragons of academic freedom and democratic practices in a region otherwise hostile to these virtues, and second, that Israeli academics and university administrators should be seen as distinct from and potentially opposed to the Israeli government’s treatment of Palestinians. In contrast, Wind shows first that Israeli universities, administrators, and academics are deeply embedded in apartheid and occupation and second that university operations, curricula, research, and geographic expansion are deliberately crafted to dispossess, discredit, exclude, and terrorize Palestinians and critics of the state of Israel.
Articles by Laura Goldblatt
Laura Goldblatt is an assistant professor in the Global Studies Program and English Department at the University of Virginia. She is a literary and cultural studies scholar of state propaganda and material culture in the twentieth-century United States. Additionally, she has written about the university as a critical site of activist intervention and the impact of its built environment and labor practices on local housing markets and economic precarity.
Review of The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies by Tiffany Lethabo King (Duke University Press)
In this ambitious first book, Tiffany Lethabo King disrupts what she sees as settler-colonial studies’ tendency to privilege the settler/conquistador as the ethical subject of Western theory. To do so, she undertakes the urgent work of considering historical, ceremonial, imaginative, and theoretical ways that Native and Black studies intersect and overlap within the North American context. Drawing in particular upon Afro-pessimism (for instance Frank Wilderson, Saidiya Hartman, Katherine McKittrick, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Sylvia Wynter) as well as Native studies’ refusal of sovereignty as a political, ethical, and material formation (Audra Simpson, Glen Coulthard, Jodi Byrd, and Andrea Smith), King joins the likes of Tiya Miles in seeing as insufficient any account of settler colonialism or Western humanism that does not consider how Black and Native epistemologies and histories intersect.