Boycotting Israel: academia, activism and the futures of American Studies

• Published in: Radical philosophy 2014-07 (186), p.2-9
• Main Author: Merck, Mandy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0300-211X

On 4 December 2013, the annual conference of the American Studies Association, ASA, resolved that its members would support both a boycott of Israeli academic institutions and the protected rights of students and scholars everywhere to engage in research and public speaking about Israel-Palestine. Despite its insistence that the resolution applies to Israeli institutions rather than individual scholars and students, over 100 US colleges and universities, the New York State Senate and 134 members of the US Congress have now condemned it for anti-Semitism and attempting to stifle academic freedom. There is no reference to Israel or Palestine in Pease and Wiegman's collection, "The Futures of American Studies". When it was published in 2002 very little of this history was an issue for Americans, or even for Americanists. It became one with the sequence of events that motivated the other resolutions on the ASA website, that is, 11 September 2001, the war in Iraq and the subsequent economic collapse that prompted the Occupy movement, future cataclysms which the contributors to that very capacious volume could not have foreseen. Dylan Rodriguez extols the painful scholarship that re-historicises American regimes of incarceration, war, sexuality and settler-colonialist power. The re-examination of America's colonialism will continue into the field's future, because of its pertinence to America's past but also because of its purchase on the present.