Moustafa Bayoumi | “I can’t imagine living next to a wall”: Palestine and the Tohono O’odham Nation

The Global Studies in Migration & Diaspora Research Workshop is excited to announce that our first event this autumn will feature Moustafa Bayoumi, Professor of English at Brooklyn College (CUNY), Stanford Humanities Center External Faculty Fellow, and author of How Does It Feel To Be a Problem?: Being Young and Arab in America and This Muslim American Life: Dispatches from the War on Terror. Join us to learn more about Professor Bayoumi's work, "'I can’t imagine living next to a wall': Palestine and the Tohono O’odham Nation." This piece informs his forthcoming book project, Like a Palestinian: How the Idea of Palestine Has Changed in—and Is Changing—America. Dinner will be served for those who RSVP.

Abstract: The Tohono O’odham Nation is a 2.8-million-acre reservation in the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona established in 1916 for the Tohono O’odham people. With its 62-mile boundary with Mexico, the Nation has the longest international border of any Indigenous group along the US-Mexico frontier. For many years, O’odham activists have noticed that the fight for O’odham rights and lands parallels the struggle for Palestinian rights and land. Both the Tohono O’odham people and the Palestinians people are haunted by a recurring politics of premature death. Both live under pervasive regimes of surveillance and survive under states of siege. Both have seen their lands taken from them and justified by military necessity. And both have also had to face their worlds being hemmed in by massive, isolating border walls. This lecture explores these parallels and investigates the current fight the O’odham people are waging to secure their rights and oppose construction of the US government’s border wall on their land.

This event is taking place in Wallenberg 433A, located within CESTA on the Fourth Floor of Wallenberg Hall.

Please RSVP for this event here: RSVP