Jennifer Lynn Kelly on Anticolonial Solidarity Tourism

[00:00:00] Cathy Hannabach: Welcome to Imagine Otherwise, the podcast about bridging art, activism, and academia to build more just futures.

[00:00:12] I’m Cathy Hannabach and I’m very excited to welcome you to the first episode of the new year. We’re returning after a much needed break that we use to rest and recharge, and we have an awesome slate of episodes lined up for this year.

[00:00:24] To kick things off, my guest today is Jennifer Lynn Kelly, who is an associate professor of feminist studies and critical race and ethnic studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research engages settler colonialism, US empire, and the fraught politics of tourism and solidarity.

[00:00:42] I am super excited to have Jenny on the show today to discuss her new book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine. In this book, Jenny traces the history of solidarity tourism in Palestine in the context of sustained displacement and decolonial activism.

[00:00:59] In our conversation, we talk about the temporality and pace of doing ethnographic research for this book, while also navigating state visa politics, job search demands, and family commitments that can pull in multiple directions.

[00:01:13] Jenny also shares the importance of letting a writing project change itself and change its writer over time, and why slowing down and listening to where our research wants to go makes for richer scholarship.

[00:01:26] We close out the episode with a vision for a demilitarized and decolonized future, as well as how we can make space for joy while building that world.

[00:01:36] Thank you so much for being with us today.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to talk with you.

Cathy Hannabach: I’d love to talk about your awesome new book, Invited to Witness, which is available now from Duke University Press. Our team at Ideas on Fire has been really privileged to work with you on this book for several years now, and I’m very excited to see it getting the props that it deserves now that it is out in the world and a real material object.

[00:02:00] I see it inspiring scholars, activists, and cultural workers in some really exciting ways. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about that book and your journey in writing it?

[00:02:10] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Thank you so much for all the kind words on the book and for being excited about it. I’m really thrilled to be at this stage of the process. I think that the most fulfilling part and the part that I talk to graduate students about the most with is how the book has shifted over time.

[00:02:29] So I began the PhD wanting to research Palestinian-led solidarity tourism because I had previously researched US Christian Zionism and tourism is such a big part of colonial state practice particularly in terms of Christian Zionist tourism to Israel.

[00:02:50] I wanted to think about when tourism got pressed into the service of anti-colonial work. I wanted initially to write about Palestinian responses to Zionist forms of tourism. So like Christian anti-Zionist delegations in response to Christian Zionist ones, queer delegations in response to LGBTQ birthright, or olive planting initiatives in response to Zionist afforestation projects.

[00:03:18] And then when I started to do the research and began interviewing tour guides and talking to them about their work, I began to understand that this is a much longer history, and it was a history that did not begin in responses to Zionist forms of tourism but began as a strategy of using tourism to name and indict and resist colonial state practice—and it began during the First Intifada.

[00:03:44] So the emergence of that form of solidarity tourism eventually led to the first chapter of the book but was one major shift in how I conceptualized the project.

[00:03:55] That was one of those moments where it became really clear to me how going into our research with our questions answered doesn’t produce the careful and rigorous work that we want to produce.

[00:04:09] It was one of the first times that being open to having the research redirected was really clear to me and really palpable to me. So that, I would say was one of the first shifts.

[00:04:21] And then a second shift was after graduate school when I did my second postdoc at UIUC [University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign] in Asian American studies.

[00:04:31] The work took a different shape and tenor during that process, too, because I had a book manuscript workshop there. And I had submitted a manuscript that was largely chronological and traced the big picture of solidarity tourism through the narratives that the tours provided.

[00:04:51] Through the workshop, it became clear that I should organize the book around my argument rather than a timeline, and so it shifted how the whole book was organized.

[00:05:02] This was another moment that was a gift in redirection. I had invited Nadine Naber and Rebecca Stein, and then my postdoc mentors were Junaid Rana and Mimi Nguyen.

[00:05:13] And then after the workshop, Mimi and I had a coffee and she explained to me what she thought the book was doing, which was such a, a real gift on her part because it allowed me to see what I was doing so much more expansively than I had been framing it. So she talked to me about what I was doing around the concept of invitation, and so in subsequent revisions I began to really clarify that.

[00:05:37] I write about Palestinian tour guides and how they do their work in a context in which they do not control their borders or the historical narrative, and thus are really wresting the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate, in Edward Said’s words, from state control.

[00:05:55] When I write about that process, I write about how they are redefining the terms of the invitation and letting tourists know that despite their real unease with the category of tourist, they’re being asked to be tourists of a particular kind, with a very specific definition.

[00:06:13] So Palestinian tour guides are really defining what they want and mean that invitation to do, what work they want that invitation to do, and what that is the invitation for—and also to shoulder the responsibility that accompanies that invitation.

[00:06:26] I would say that allowing and really inviting my own project to shift with time is what has made the book stronger and I really tried to be present for those shifts and hear the guidance being offered to me to enable me to be a more careful and thoughtful scholar.

[00:06:46] Cathy Hannabach: It seems like one of the things that allows us to be present to hear those shifts is slowing down on a project enough to be able to listen.

[00:06:56] And it’s so hard. It’s so hard, particularly toward the end where you can kind of see the finish line and you’re like, I just want the damn thing done, especially if it started out as a dissertation.

[00:07:09] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Right.

[00:07:10] Cathy Hannabach: I’m curious about kind of how that relationship between slowing down and maybe speeding up has played out in how you pace yourself in your research and your teaching and your other kinds of projects.

[00:07:23] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Yeah. I love this question because I think that that so gets at what the process is, like a complete slowing down in order to be present and a speeding up in terms of so many things outside of our control.

[00:07:38] One thing I I thought about when you were asking that is in terms of my research, because to do research in Palestine, not affiliated with an academic institution, to respect a boycott, you’re doing research on a tourist visa and that research can be limited to three months if you are not let back in.

[00:07:57] So I had to do really compressed research each time. The pace of the research was really fast. I would have moments where I would be interviewing a tour guide in the morning and going on a tour in the afternoon and going on several tours during the same week, or multiple tours in one day, or multiple interviews in one day, or this very fast-paced interviewing and fast-paced fieldwork in order to be able to raise the sort of questions that I wanted the book to raise and to allow the research to unfold in the ways that, that, that needed to, for the project.

[00:08:34] But the space and time of the interview is actually really slow. I was really committed in the project to not asking my interlocutors to relive this sort of trauma of their experiences, especially because solidarity tourism can so often ask that of them.

[00:08:52] And so my questions were really about their work and about how they do this work, why they do this work, what that work looks like, what it feels like, what they wish it could be, these kinds of questions about their daily labor.

[00:09:07] And those conversations were really slow, like those conversations were often interrupted those conversations often went on tangents, those conversations were guided by what unfolds during an interview.

[00:09:18] You can’t predict that with your questions, you can’t predetermine what is going to be covered.

[00:09:25] So I think being present and slowing down for the space of the interview, even in a really fast-paced research trajectory and plan, is one of the things that allowed me to think about the different kinds of temporality in which I do this work.

[00:09:43] Cathy Hannabach: How did those lessons about temporality and slowing down show up for you after the research was already complete? So, how did they show up for you when you were putting the book together, when you were working with editors, doing final manuscript provisions, and ultimately submitting the manuscript to the press to go into production? How did those issues of temporality show up in that process?

[00:10:06] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: The pandemic, of course, taught me ways to slow down. We were in Austin, which was unmasked. It felt very unsafe to go anywhere, planning a pregnancy and doing IVF.

[00:10:20] So I, like so many people, I was actually gifted a sourdough starter and learned that slow and fast process of that kind of baking and was doing all these sort of like home things to come up with new coping strategies that would protect our family that we were building.

[00:10:39] A t the same time, it really was also a ramping up of work. I was teaching two classes up to like the 37^th week of the pregnancy, and we were in the middle of trying to find our institutional home. We were dealing with job market stuff and all of the stress to figure out how to be at the same institution while dealing with a lot of complications with pregnancy.

[00:11:04] It was kind of a slowness of being in the house all the time, but a very sped up version of work online and a very sped up version of constantly being on Zoom and constantly navigating not only my own things happening but everything else happening as well.

[00:11:27] I think that these moments are moments that are understood as slowing down, but are also moments of a sort of speed with which you feel like you can’t keep up.

[00:11:38] I submitted my manuscript on the way to the hospital— and my tenure file. So I submitted both of those things on the way to the hospital and it felt like I was really clearing space for a new moment in my life, a new chapter in my life, and clearing space for this little human who I was about to meet.

[00:11:57] Deciding where we were going to be, which was the first time that we’ve had real choices, part of that decision was about slowing down in terms of being at a place with reasonable and transparent tenure requirements, particularly for someone who works on Palestine, being at a place with substantive maternity leave, parental leave, which enabled me to actually slow down, which should be unequivocally accessible to everyone.

[00:12:25] So this crescendoing uncertainty, led to being able to actually reorient my relationship to work, to be okay with spending my time differently. I think that’s a good lesson that I have relearned many times and will probably continue to relearn.

[00:12:46] Cathy Hannabach: You mentioned writing this book while being on the academic job market, and that’s an experience that a lot of our listeners have navigated in the past or are currently navigating or are looking forward to navigating in the future.

[00:12:59] I’d love to hear a little bit more about how you balanced time spent researching and writing the book alongside teaching obligations and the immense amount of time and energy that the academic job market requires. How did you navigate that process?

[00:13:17] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think that one of the sort of lessons that I’ve learned over time is understanding what’s possible in each sort of season of academia.

[00:13:27] So I finished the PhD in 2015 and I had two postdocs after that. I had the PPFP, the UC President’s Postdoc, and then I had a Asian American studies postdoc at UIUC, before my position at Santa Cruz. Each of those postdocs came after seasons of job market and then also the two-body problem with a partner who’s in academia also.

[00:13:57] So every summer was a time of precarity and also not knowing what position, what health insurance, what anything I was going to have in August, in May of the proceeding year. So what I tried to do during the last few years of grad school, during my time on the postdocs, was make a process that could somewhat sustain me during so much uncertainty.

[00:14:23] So on a daily level, I would organize my time around my teaching blocks if I was teaching and then have essentially the morning for working on the dissertation. And then I would try to fit in remembering to eat and remembering to go outside and have time in the evenings for job market applications, and letter writing requests and everything that goes into that. And so every fall was that kind of schedule, and every spring was more heavy on editing because I was essentially waiting to hear back from job market stuff.

[00:15:01] Now it’s really interesting to be headed into June and to be very stable. Academia asks us and demands that we don’t have that kind of certainty for so long and so many years that you almost don’t know what to do with that kind of certainty when you do have it or how to navigate knowing that you have that certainty when so many other people don’t.

[00:15:26] One of the things of navigating change has been understanding the structural inequities of each of these moments, in each of these seasons and still finding ways to connect, when you do have stability, supporting those who have less stability or when you do have certainty, supporting those with more uncertainty.

[00:15:46] I think that that’s a big part of it, is remembering that you’re not navigating those changes in isolation, even though we’re conditioned to feel like we are.

[00:15:57] Cathy Hannabach: This brings me to my absolute favorite question that I get to talk with folks about, which really gets at the heart of why you do the kind of work that you do. So what’s the world that you’re working toward? What kind of world do you want?

[00:16:12] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: I want a world where Palestine is liberated. I want a world where we only speak of colonialism and warfare and militarism and occupation in the past tense, doing this interview where I am right now, having the book going into production a year after I submitted the manuscript and brought my daughter into this world, I think her presence has served, and I wrote about this in my acknowledgements, really as not a break from this work, but a really steady reminder to craft a world where all babies are free and to make space for joy while building that world.

[00:16:57] Cathy Hannabach: Well, thank you so much for being with us today and sharing all of these amazing ways that you imagine otherwise.

[00:17:04] Jennifer Lynn Kelly: Thank you so much for having me. It’s been so lovely to talk with you.

[00:17:09] Cathy Hannabach: Thanks for joining me for this episode of Imagine Otherwise, and a big thanks to Jennifer Lynn Kelly for sharing her research and writing process.

[00:17:19] You can learn more about her new book, Invited to Witness, as well as her other projects on our website at ideasonfire.net, where you’ll also find a teaching guide for this episode as well as related books and resource.

[00:17:32] This episode was produced and edited by me, Cathy Hannabach, and social media and show notes support was provided by Christopher Persaud and Sara Tatyana Bernstein.

[00:17:43] Want to support Imagine Otherwise? We would love it if you would share this episode with a friend or consider teaching it in your classroom. You can also subscribe to the show wherever you get your podcasts.