Olive Insurrections: Palestinian Survival in a Vanishing Landscape

A presentation by Prof. Dr. Lila Sharif, University of Urbana-Champagne (USA) on November 26, 2017 in Berlin.

This presentation is about conflicting narratives around the Palestinian olive tree. Specifically, it connects themes of appropriation, displacement, land conquest, neoliberalism and refugee memory to explore the politics of everyday survival for Palestinians located in an increasingly vanishing homeland and in the diaspora. Through multi-sited ethnography, I trace the olive from the moment it is picked and harvested in the Occupied Palestinian territoires to its circulation to the West—linking the West Bank and Gaza to San Francisco and Los Angeles. Through ethnographic and cultural studies methodologies, I analyze the relationships between neoliberal market inclusion and the Zionist project of Palestinian annihilation. I argue that the olive is a site where Palestinian subjectivities and landscapes are simultaneously branded and elided—a process I conceptualize as vanishment.