Books by Jennifer L Kelly
Duke University Press, 2023
In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity t... more In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.
Special Issues by Jennifer L Kelly
Critical Ethnic Studies, Volume 6, Issue 2 , 2021
This special issue seeks to conceptualize connections between border regimes around the world. Ta... more This special issue seeks to conceptualize connections between border regimes around the world. Taking up sites that range from US/Mexico, to the Mediterranean, to Palestine/Israel, and beyond, contributors move past superficial comparisons and think through the circulation of technologies, expertise, policing, and surveillance alongside the circulation of anti-colonial strategies via transnational social movements. By bridging conversations that are typically kept in separate academic silos—for example, critical refugee studies, Asian American studies, Black studies, Native studies, Middle East studies, European critical migration studies, comparative colonial studies—these pieces produce theoretically rigorous and empirically grounded investigations of borders outside of what is typically understood as belonging to the field of border studies. This approach emerges from an understanding that the urgent challenges of our current moment as they relate to borders, migration, and displacement require creative approaches that actively trouble disciplinary boundaries.
Journal Articles by Jennifer L Kelly
Q&A: Voices from Queer Asian America , 2021
Feminist Formations, Volume 32, Issue 2 (Summer 2020): 79-110.
Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research on solidarity tours in Palestine, this essay shows... more Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research on solidarity tours in Palestine, this essay shows how Palestinian solidarity tour guides reject performing subjection in an industry that treats the recitation of subjection as a prerequisite. Building from feminist analyses of colonial knowledge production, I first detail how epistemic violence shapes tourists' expectations of Palestine and predetermines how they understand Palestinian freedom struggles. On solidarity tours, Palestinians are expected to rehearse their displacement and provide evidence of their (extremely well-documented) dispossession against a constellation of US and Israeli state sanctioned narratives that have rendered them unreliable narrators. Working at the intersections of Palestinian studies, critical tourism studies, feminist studies, and decolonial ethnography, I then document how Palestinian tour guides disrupt tourist expectations by refusing to perform subjection for the tourist gaze. In alternative performances of pleasure and through acts of "hanging out," Palestinian tour guides intervene in tourist desire for a performance of trauma and instead ask tourists to confront the violences of their own expectations and assumptions. I thus explore how solidarity tourists and Palestinian organizers struggle, on uneven terrain, to craft an anti-colonial movement outside of a strictly witness/witnessed relationship and despite the epistemic violence and settler logics that structure their encounter.
GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Queer Security Studies Dossier, Eds. Tallie Ben-Daniel and Hilary Berwick, Volume 26, Issue 1 (January 2020): 160-173.
American Quarterly, Special Issue: Tours of Duty/Tours of Leisure, eds. Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez, Jana K. Lipman, and Teresia Teaiwa, Volume 68, Issue 3 (September 2016): 723-745. , 2016
Theorizing Fieldwork in the Humanities: Methods, Reflections, and Approaches to the Global South, eds. Shalini Puri and Debra Castillo (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016): 97-110. , 2016
Book Reviews by Jennifer L Kelly
Transfers: Interdisciplinary Journal of Mobility Studies Volume 10, 2020
Review of Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism, ed.s Jocelyne Guilbault a... more Review of Sounds of Vacation: Political Economies of Caribbean Tourism, ed.s Jocelyne Guilbault and Timothy Rommen (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019)
Mashriq & Mahjar 6:2, 2019
Radical History Review 133, 2019
This book review essay places Caren Kaplan’s Aerial Aftermaths, Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to W... more This book review essay places Caren Kaplan’s Aerial Aftermaths, Jennifer Terry’s Attachments to War, Inderpal Grewal’s Saving the Security State, and Lisa Parks and Caren Kaplan’s edited volume Life in the Age of Drone Warfare in the same analytic frame in order to document the violence of US empire and trace the everyday attachments that sustain it. Taken together, these texts diagnose twenty-first-century America, catalogue and historicize the exceptionalism that rationalizes state violence, and detail the sensory and affective lives of those who wage war and those subject to it. The conversation they initiate intervenes in what Terry calls the “labyrinth of excuses” that sanction warfare. In their feminist cultural studies approaches to surveillance, security, and war, they disrupt the refrains that position war as liberatory or beneficial and technology as capable of domesticating state violence.
Middle East Report 283: 47, 2017
Anamesa: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2008
the Guys: Women as Torturers and Aggressors, a collection of essays that explores the role of wom... more the Guys: Women as Torturers and Aggressors, a collection of essays that explores the role of women as perpetrators of violence in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal. This book review argues that the collection itself, as it is framed as a feminist interrogation of "women as torturers and aggressors," first, entirely eclipses the torture of Iraqi women at Abu Ghraib. Second, it naturalizes male violence in its sole and excessive focus on female violence. Third, it solicits the sense making of what took place at Abu Ghraib, which consigns torture to the past, maintains the illusion of the torture at Abu Ghraib as an anomaly, and resists interrogating the strategic use of torture in the context of empire. The compilation, then, while contentious and challenged by several of its own contributors, fails to address the historical complexity of the torture at Abu Ghraib.
Papers by Jennifer L Kelly
Duke University Press eBooks, Jan 6, 2023
Invited to Witness and Invited to Go Home "They called me a tourist, which I found insulting. " S... more Invited to Witness and Invited to Go Home "They called me a tourist, which I found insulting. " So began a reflection by a delegate I interviewed who had gone on solidarity tours to Palestine during the first intifada. She grappled with her discomfort in occupying this term: tourist. She outlined her rationale, explaining that the designation tourism, attached to what she did in Palestine, felt derisive of her work, as though it wasn't serious and diminished the connections she made, connections seldom pos si ble via tourism writ large. On a del e ga tion during the summer of 2019, as we sat on the porch of the Tamimis' house, in Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, I navigated a similar sentiment. Ahed Tamimi, eigh teen years old at the time of our visit, was arrested in December 2017 for famously slapping an Israeli soldier, sentenced to eight months in an Israeli prison, and released in July 2018. The delegates had just heard a lecture by her father, Bassam Tamimi, which outlined what they, as a family and a people, needed. As Ahed rounded the circle of thirty delegates, perfunctorily shaking each one's hand, Bassam told the delegates that what Palestinians needed was not tears ("We have enough tear gas, " he wryly joked) but solidarity. After a dinner hosted by the Tamimis, the
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Books by Jennifer L Kelly
Special Issues by Jennifer L Kelly
Journal Articles by Jennifer L Kelly
Book Reviews by Jennifer L Kelly
Papers by Jennifer L Kelly