Graduation Date
8-2020
Document Type
Thesis
Department/Program Conferring Degree
International Studies
Keywords
Palestine, healing, resistance, archive, indigenous knowledge
Abstract
In this thesis, I trace how colonial powers fragment and silence Palestinian knowledge practices as another mode of genocide. And locate silences (Trouillot 1995) by analyzing how colonial powers confiscate land, farming tools, and criminalizes Palestinians from foraging in an aim to disrupt any engagement with their knowledge practices and land. I argue that Palestinian interpersonal experience with ancestral knowledge recontextualizes a history of Palestine outside the simplistic binaries produced by colonial histories. These knowledge practices of healing can enable a politics of resistance under the Israeli occupation. I aim to initiate a living archive of these practices. I define “living” archive as a tool, an emergent strategy, a phrase by Adrienne Marie Brown, in order to weave personal practices with collective organizing. This living archive can build an intimate political and social space to share Palestinian histories, an ostensible bridge between theory, narrative, and praxis. I take from Trouillot when he states that “the source is alive” (1995, 162), when talking about artifacts and people as bodies that continually carry history (Trouillot 1995, 162). I locate stories through interviews with Palestinians, to gather experiences about these knowledge practices in relation to healing bodies.
Recommended Citation
Risheq, Sarah, "Recovering Palestinian ancestral remedies as a politics of return" (2020). College of Liberal Arts & Social Sciences Theses and Dissertations. 287.
https://via.library.depaul.edu/etd/287