In Invited to Witness, Jennifer Lynn Kelly explores the significance of contemporary solidarity tourism across Occupied Palestine. Examining the relationships among race, colonialism, and movement-building in spaces where tourism and military occupation operate in tandem, Kelly argues that solidarity tourism in Palestine functions as both political strategy and emergent industry. She draws from fieldwork on solidarity tours in Palestine/Israel and interviews with guides, organizers, community members, and tourists, asking what happens when tourism is marketed as activism and when anticolonial work functions through tourism. Palestinian organizers, she demonstrates, have refashioned the conventions of tourism by extending invitations to tourists to witness Palestinian resistance and the effects of Israeli state practice on Palestinian land and lives. In so doing, Kelly shows how Palestinian guides and organizers wrest from Israeli control the capacity to invite and the permission to narrate both their oppression and their liberation.
Jennifer Lynn Kelly is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. The Colonial Calculus of Veracity: Delegations under Erasure and the Desire for Evidentiary Weight 21 2. Asymmetrical Itineraries: Militarism, Tourism, and Fragmentation under Occupation 59 3. Recitation against Erasure: Planting, Harvesting, and Narrating the Continuities of Displacement 87 4. Itineraries under Duress: Tours across Three Occupations of One City 112 5. Colonial Ruins and a Decolonized Future: Witnessing and Return in Historic Palestine 138 6. "Welcome to Gaza": On the Politics of Invitation and the Right to Tourism 179 7. Witnesses in Palestine: Imperfect Analogies, Acts of Translation, and Refusals to Perform 211 Conclusion: On Futurity, Failure, and Precarious Hope 245 Notes 253 Bibliography 287 Index 311
"In this sophisticated academic study, Jennifer Lynn Kelly probes the complexities of solidarity tourism in Palestine. . . . Kelly's impressive field research yields a nuanced analysis rather than an uncritical celebration of solidarity tourism." - Walter L. Hixson (Washington Report on Middle East Affairs) "This book offers deep insights into the Palestinian memories of loss, and the cultural boundaries between insiders and outsiders. . . . The author succeeds in using a variety of materials (interviews, films, history, literature, etc.), mobilizing different tools of cultural studies to reveal the impasses of telling the past and the present of Palestine." - Abdessamad Belhaj (Social Identities) "Kelly makes a major contribution to the study of so-called solidarity tourism in Palestine, exploring its well-researched effect on national identity, lived experience, political strategy, and economic influence throughout the Occupied Palestinian Territories. . . . Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty." - B. Osborne (Choice) "A guide to how non-Palestinian researchers can conduct research that neither essentializes or erases Palestinian knowledge and experience. ... Kelly's book is a welcome addition to the literature on global phenomenon in Palestine." - Charles Finn (Postcolonial Interventions) "[Kelly's book] will inspire students to examine the past and benevolently imagine the future unflinchingly." - Lynne Rogers (Al Jadid) "Kelly's Invited to Witness is ripe with Palestinian moments that speak of the intricacy, beauty, and courage embedded in our ways of being and doing things. . . . the most illuminating aspect of Kelly's book becomes what she herself represents in her study: a cultural translator, a US citizen writing to other 'Americans' about the responsibility involved in visiting and writing about Palestine. You cannot just witness it-you have to actively pursue its liberation and reflect it in your actions, scholarship, and your intentional conversations with others." - Eman Ghanayem (Public Books) "Invited to Witness is a brilliant innovative study of Palestinian resistance. . . . Invited to Witness is a valuable addition to the scholarship about Palestine and Palestinian resistance in the face of this intractable conflict. It would be of interest to scholars and students of Palestine and Middle East studies, history, political science, anthropology, and peace and conflict resolution." (Arab Studies Quarterly) "Invited to Witness is a compelling book which helps to illuminate this Palestinian pedagogy of teaching life, a life of joy and solidarity in struggle, committed to active, intersectional decolonial practice and offering a gift of insights which Kelly has worked so effectively to share with us." - Freya Higgins-Desbiolles (Journal of Tourism History) "Invited to Witness offers the first in-depth monograph focused specifically on solidarity tourism in Palestine. Kelly's interdisciplinary book makes invaluable contributions to this expanding subfield in its well-researched and carefully argued analysis of solidarity tourism as an ambivalently pursued anticolonial strategy and industry." - Maryam S. Griffin (Mobilization) "Invited to Witness will be powerful for advanced undergraduates and graduate students alike. It is a brilliant contribution to scholarly debates about tourism, solidarity, and Palestinian resistance, while also providing astute reflections on internationalist organizing strategies." - Christopher Courtheyn (Antipode)
