Acknowledging Indigenous land in one place / disavowing it in another: Brenna Bhandar, ‘A Land Acknowledgment in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption of the Liberal Script’, Middle east Critique, 2024 | settler colonial studies blog

Acknowledging Indigenous land in one place / disavowing it in another: Brenna Bhandar, ‘A Land Acknowledgment in a Different Key: Palestine, Solidarity and the Disruption of the Liberal Script’, Middle east Critique, 2024

11Jul24

Abstract: Rather than the exception to an otherwise progressive intellectual environment in North American, and specifically Canadian universities, the suppression of speech related to Palestine reveals the racial limits of a settler-colonial liberal politics of acknowledgment and reconciliation. The mainstream or institutional conceptualisation of academic freedom does not address the structural racism and settler-colonial realities within which Canadian universities are embedded, rendering them as ‘natural’ allies for Israeli institutions and state practices. A complicated, if revealing, moment of exposure of the limits of the liberal script of reconciliation is the land acknowledgment, which has become, since October 2023, an opportunity grasped by some critical scholars to acknowledge the links between the ongoing genocide in Palestine and settler colonialism across Turtle Island. Tracing the oppositional functions of the land acknowledgment, this article exposes the political limits of a liberal racial order, which is explicitly challenged by expressions of solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation.

Filed under: Uncategorized | Closed