Faculty Fellow Lecture Series: Kareem Rabie, Anthropology “Everywhere in the World there is a Chinatown, in China there is a Khaliltown: on Palestine, China, and the Circulation in Between”
Faculty Fellow Lecture Series
April 10, 2025
4:00 PM - 5:30 PM
Location
Institute for the Humanities, 153 Behavioral Sciences Building
Address
1007 W. Harrison St., Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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This talk is an introduction to ongoing research and new writing on contemporary human and economic geographies in, and in-between, the West Bank and China. Beginning with a focus on small commodity exchange between Palestinians in Yiwu and in the West Bank, it attempts to understand changing forms of community and national identification among Palestinians, the impact that mechanisms governing free trade have on them, and what flows of commodity and capital have to do with the occupation. It combines ethnographic field work in Palestine and China with historical accounts of Palestinian state building after the Oslo Accords and labor patterns among port workers under the British Mandate. It ends by scaling up towards an account of general forms of connection and disconnection as matters of culture, politics, production, and possibility.
Kareem Rabie is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois Chicago. His first book, Palestine is Throwing a Party and the Whole World is Invited: Capital and State Building in the West Bank was published by Duke University Press in 2021. It focuses on privatization, urban development, and the state-building project in the West Bank. Prior to joining the faculty at UIC, he was an assistant professor at American University in Washington, DC; Harper-Schmidt Fellow at the University of Chicago; and Marie Curie Fellow/Senior Researcher at The University of Oxford.
Contact huminst@uic.edu to request accessibility accommodations.
Date posted
May 23, 2024
Date updated
Mar 13, 2025