THE HUMANITIES FORUM
KEYNOTE 2025
IN THE OPEN TIME OF DISPOSSESSION:
CAMP, COLONY, PALESTINE
Speaker: Nasser Abourahme (Bowdoin College)
Respondent: Beshara Doumani (Brown University)
May 2, 2025
5:00 – 6:30 PM
20 Washington Place, Auditorium 143
REGISTRATION REQUIRED — Please register using the form below.
About the Lecture
Settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. This is nowhere clearer than in the struggle over Palestine. In this keynote, Nasser Abourahme takes as his primary object the Palestinian refugee camps created in the aftermath of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding. He explores how these camps have become the primary site where settler colonial efforts to dominate both space and time are met with Indigenous refusal.
Seen from the vantage of the camps, Israel appears as a settler colonial project trapped in its own foundational moment of conquest. Simultaneously, the Palestinian insistence on return resists the closure of the past into a settler-defined future. Rather than unfolding within the “open time of dispossession,” the Palestinian struggle unfolds over this time—keeping it open, unresolved, and charged with anticolonial potential.
About the Speaker
Nasser Abourahme is an Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. His interdisciplinary work bridges comparative colonial history, political geography, and political theory. His teaching and research interests include borders and migration; histories of encampment and carcerality; settler colonialism and race; revolution and revolt; Marxism and global Left thought; the anticolonial tradition; and the question of Palestine.
Abourahme is the author of The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony (Duke University Press, 2025), which explores the temporal dimensions of settler colonialism and Indigenous resistance in Palestine. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals such as Critical Times, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, Radical Philosophy, and the Journal of Palestine Studies.
About the Respondent
Beshara Doumani is the inaugural Mahmoud Darwish Professor of Palestinian Studies at Brown University, the first endowed chair dedicated to this field. He served as President of Birzeit University in Palestine from 2021 to 2023. Doumani’s research focuses on marginalized groups, places, and time periods in the early modern and modern Middle East, emphasizing the social, economic, and legal history of the Eastern Mediterranean. Among his numerous publications are Rediscovering Palestine: Merchants and Peasants in Jabal Nablus, 1700–1900 (University of California Press, 1995) and Family Life in the Ottoman Mediterranean: A Social History (Cambridge University Press, 2017).
Event Registration
Please use the form below to register for the 2025 Keynote Lecture of the Humanities Forum at RISD. We look forward to your participation in this special event. Please note that we are not accepting group registrations. Each attendee must complete and submit an individual registration form.
