Postcolonial Studies

Words Are Not Enough: Palestine

Ongoing series: editorial collective

In a time when the world watches the destruction of Gaza, unwilling or unable to stop its continuation, silence is impossible, yet words feel insufficient. This ongoing series, “Words Are Not Enough: Palestine”, invites contributions that confront the genocidal realities unfolding in Palestine and the global conditions that make them possible. It draws on the momentum to ‘Stop the Genocide’, which has garnered millions globally, to consider the parameters and factors that shape such a call in our twenty-first-century present.

Postcolonial Studies (journal of the Institute of Postcolonial Studies, Melbourne) has long examined the entanglements of empire, race, and colonial modernity. Yet the current moment demands more. As Palestine once again reveals the violent foundations of the global order, we ask: what does it mean to (re)theorise the postcolonial in a time of genocide? What is the responsibility of scholars, artists, educators and activists when supremacist ideology, colonialism, empire, militarism, and racial capitalism are laid bare with such violence and clarity?

We call for writing that refuses neutrality, that takes seriously the need for urgent action beyond words, and which moves our collective thinking further toward anti-genocide resistance and action.

This series will gather articles/essays, interventions, creative works, and dialogues under the broad theme of Gaza genocide and anti-genocide resistance. We welcome reflections from Palestine and across the world that trace the continuities of imperial and colonial violence and the practices of resistance, including sumud (steadfastness/endurance).

This will be a living, ongoing editorial series, published under the auspices of Postcolonial Studies, curated collectively and continuously.

Submissions: We welcome scholarly articles (subject to peer-review), creative responses, and interviews.

Themes & Possible Clusters

Theme 1: Genocide, Coloniality, and the Global Order

• Genocide, postcolonialism, and the (settler)colonial present
• Political economy of genocide and complicity
• Empire, theology, and civilisation
• Islamophobia and genocidal intent
• Ecocide and genocide
• The death of liberal humanism

Theme 2: Mediating and Knowing

• Mediating genocide
• Memory and grief
• Pedagogies of resistance and anti-colonial education
• Movement for Gaza and knowledge making
• Teaching Gaza genocide

Theme 3: Institutional Power and Academic Complicity

• Institutional complicity
• Academic repression, censorship, and the policing of dissent
• Student repression
• University complicity and militarisation of knowledge

Theme 4: Anti-Genocide Praxis and Resistance

• Anti-Genocide as praxis
• Resistance to colonial warfare
• Sumud (steadfastness/endurance)
• Transnational solidarities
• Testimonies
• Witnessing, survival
• Memory and grief
• Resistance and refusal
• Rethinking solidarity, justice, and freedom