'Cultivating Sustainable Sovereignty: Palestinian Agrarian Lives in Transnational Focus'

This talk will share a chapter from my first book project, Cultivating Sustainable Sovereignty: Palestinian Agrarian Lives in Transnational Focus. How have Palestinian agro-ecological and food systems changed due to settler colonialism over time? How do Palestinians’ agricultural practices and relationships - their food sovereignty efforts - serve their struggles for cultural and political sovereignty? Finally, how has the struggle for Palestinian food sovereignty turned global? I argue that Palestinian farmers in the northern West Bank use sustainable development to remain on their lands, but that doing so requires them to engage in the booms and busts of global capital. Furthermore, I detail how Israel uses agricultural science and the law to claim Palestinian farmers as naturally part of the environment and inferior cultivators - thus justifying their expulsion. I trace how such rhetoric by Israel and its supporters changed from the 20th century Green Revolution primacy of technoscientific dominance over “traditional” Palestinian agriculture, to the 21st century extolling of Jewish agricultural practices as authentic to the land and therefore, environmentally friendly. Finally, I demonstrate that Palestinian Americans’ engagement with practices of food sovereignty outside of Palestine is part of a transnational project of stewarding and protecting traditional Palestinian crops and foods that are under threat within Palestine under the hopes of returning the plants - and people - to the land someday. In both Palestine and the diaspora, Palestinians demonstrate creative methods to maintain and transmit cultural food knowledge across generations in the face of political and environmental threats to their livelihoods.

Speaker: Gabi Kirk, Cal Poly Humboldt