ICM LECTURE SERIES
SPRING 2026
NASSER ABOURAHME (Assistant Professor, Middle Eastern and North African Studies, Bowdoin College)
In the Open Time of Dispossession: Camp, Colony, Palestine
Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Goldwin Smith Hall, Kaufmann Auditorium G64
4:45 P.M—6:15 P.M.
Abstract
Settler colonialism is always as much an attempt to conquer time as it is to conquer land. This is nowhere clearer than in the struggle over Palestine. And at no point starker than in the genocide in Gaza. In this talk, I take as my primary object the Palestinian refugee camps created in the fallout of the eliminatory violence of Israel’s founding to show how these camps become the main place where settler colonial attempts to dominate space and time encounter Indigenous refusal. Seen from the camps, Israel becomes a settler colonial project defined by its inability to move past the past—a project stuck at its foundational moment of conquest. At the same time, the Palestinian insistence on return is a refusal to abide by the closure of the past into settler futurity. Palestinian struggle does not just happen in the open time of dispossession; it happens over this time. This struggle is a form of anticolonial refusal that draws its power not from any decisive finality, but precisely from irresolution and keeping time open.
Bio
Nasser Abourahme is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at Bowdoin College. Prof. Abourahme’s research is in and between comparative colonial history, political geography, and political theory, specifically, borders and migration; histories of encampment and carcerality; settler colonialism and race; revolution and revolt; Marxism and global Left thought; the anticolonial tradition; and the question of Palestine. His book The Time beneath the Concrete: Palestine between Camp and Colony, was published by Duke University Press, and awarded the 2025 Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award.
Thursday, February 26
GRADUATE SEMINAR
ON THE NECESSITY OF GENOCIDE: PALESTINE AND UNWORLDING
Toboggan Lodge, 38 Forest Home Drive | 9:00 A.M. –11:00 A.M. REGISTRATION IS REQUIRED TO ATTEND. CONTACT ICM@CORNELL.EDU FOR MORE DETAILS
Co-sponsored by the Southwest Asian and North Africa Program, Einaudi Center for International Studies
If you need accommodations to participate in this event, please contact icm@cornell.edu as soon as possible.
