Resisting Erasure: Palestine, Neutrality, & the Politics of Silence

This conversation draws on themes from Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso 2025) to explore how Palestine is framed and sometimes rendered unspeakable within contemporary intellectual and public life. Taking the concept of "neutrality" as a starting point, the discussion will reflect on how claims to objectivity and balance can function to obscure settler-colonial violence and reproduce forms of anti-Palestinian racism. The conversation will consider how Palestinian writers have imagined, written, and spoken against erasure, drawing on anti-colonial traditions to challenge silence and reassert the possibility of intellectual and political solidarity.

About the Speaker:

Dr Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian-Canadian poet, human rights activist and researcher. She is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at King's College London, where her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. Rafeef has worked as researcher and campaigns organiser with a number of refugee rights and anti-poverty NGOs. Her recent research is broadly concerned with the political economy of maritime infrastructures and logistics, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. She is currently examining the impact of Gulf Cooperation Council military and commercial interventions following the 2011 Arab uprisings. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book, Revolutionary Feminisms (Verso 2020).

The Moderator:

Dr Sara Marzagora is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at King's College London. She is a literary and intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. She studies world literature and global intellectual history from the perspective of Ethiopian texts. Her research is comparative and interdisciplinary and straddles literary studies and the history of political thought. Sara has co-edited the volume Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation (with Francesca Orsini, 2025) and is currently completing a book titled The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopia in a Colonial World (1901-1919) and co-editing another volume on national multilingualism in South Asia and the Horn of Africa with Javed Majeed.

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This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. It is open to the public and held on Zoom. The event is free to attend but the Zoom registration page has, by default, an optional donation amount that you can change to zero (or whatever you wish). Donations go to The Philosopher magazine to cover our costs and expand the scope of our series.

Please send feedback or comments about our events directly to thephilosopher1923@gmail.com. We'd love to hear from you!

About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.