#FromFerguson2Gaza
Spatialities of Protest in Black-Palestinian Solidarity Movements
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i1.2105Keywords:
Transnational solidarity, social movements, spatialities of protest, Palestine, Black Lives Matter, cyberspaceAbstract
Palestinian and Black activists have maintained a history of solidarity and mutual support since the 1960s, yet in recent years, this solidarity has strengthened and expanded. Joint Black and Palestinian activism against state-sanctioned violence was further energized during the 2014 Ferguson protests, when activists expanded their collaborations over social media, in demonstrations, and through jointly organized meetings, conferences, and workshops. While the Palestinian quest for self-determination and Black American struggles for racial equality have been examined extensively, recent intersections between the two movements have received little scholarly attention. This paper investigates the spatiality of Black and Palestinian activists’ engagement in transnational collaborative resistance efforts to counter American and Israeli hegemony, through both physical space and cyberspace. While previous studies have examined the symbiotic potential of physical and cyberspace activism, our case study demonstrates how young people have used their tech-savvy knowledge of the benefits and shortcomings of the Internet to strategically raise their narratives to the fore, and consequently incite global awareness and participation in the Black-Palestinian struggle. By capitalizing on the spatialities of online and offline activism, young people have re-spatialized the movement, democratizing it to foster inclusive transnational collaboration, flatten power hierarchies, and raise new leadership within the movement itself.
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Meek, David. 2012. “YouTube and Social Movements: A Phenomenological Analysis of Participation, Events and Cyberplace.” Antipode 44, no. 4: 1429-1448.
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Prouse, Carolyn. 2018. “Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo de Alemão.” Antipode 50, no. 3: 621-640.
Pulido, Laura and Juan De Lara. 2018. “Reimagining ‘Justice’ in Environmental Justice: Radical Ecologies, Decolonial Thought, and the Black Radical Tradition.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 no. 1–2: 76–98.
Rotman, Dana, Sarah Vieweg, Sarita Yardi, Ed Chi, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman, Peter Pirolli, and Tom Glaisyer. 2011. “From Slacktivism to Activism: Participatory Culture in the Age of Social Media.” CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 819-822.
Routledge, Paul. 2017. Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest. London: Pluto Press.
Rozema, Jaap, Matthew Cashmore, Alan Bond, and Jason Chilvers. 2015. “Respatialization and Local Protest Strategy Formation: Investigating High-speed Rail Megaproject Development in the UK.” Geoforum 59: 98-108.
Salaita, Steven. 2015. Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Shelton, Taylor. 2019. “Digital Civics.” Digital Geographies. Sage Publications: London.
Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 1: 28-41.
Sundberg, Juanita. 2007. “Reconfiguring North-South Solidarity: Critical Reflections on Experiences of Transnational Resistance.” Antipode 39, no. 1: 144-166.
The Movement for Black Lives. n.d. “Invest-Divest.” The Movement for Black Lives. https://policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/ (accessed 10 October 2017).
Thomas, David. 1991. “Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson's Cultural Model of Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Valenzuela, Sebastián. 2013. “Unpacking the Use of Social Nedia for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism.” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7: 920-942.
Van De Donk, Wim, Brian Loader, Paul Nixon, and Dieter Rucht. 2004. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movement. London: Routledge.
Young, Lewis. 1972. “American Blacks and the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 1: 70-85.
Ash, James, Rob Kitchin, and Agnieszka Leszczynski. 2018. “Digital Turn, Digital Geographies?” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 1: 25-43.
Bailey, Kristian. 2015. “Black–Palestinian Solidarity in the Ferguson–Gaza era.” American Quarterly 67, no. 4: 1017-1026.
Black Lives Matter. n.d. “About the Black Lives Matter Network.” http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ (accessed 10 November 2017).
Black-Palestinian Solidarity. n.d. “About: Black-Palestinian Solidarity.” http://www.blackpalestiniansolidarity.com/about.html (accessed 10 November 2017).
Black Solidarity with Palestine. 2015. “2015 Black Statement of Solidarity with Palestine.” http://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html (accessed 12 November 2017).
Brenner, Lenni and Matthew Quest. 2013. Black Liberation and Palestine Solidarity. Atlanta: On Our Own Authority! Publishing.
Brock, Andre. 2011. “Beyond the pale: The Blackbird Web Browser’s Critical Reception.” New Media & Society 13, no. 7: 1085–1103.
Brown, Gavin and Helen Yaffe. 2014. “Practices of solidarity: Opposing Apartheid in the Centre of London.” Antipode 46: 34-52.
Carty, Victoria and Jake Onyett. 2006. “Protest, Cyberactivism and New Social Movements: The Reemergence of the Peace Movement Post 9/11.” Social Movement Studies 5, no. 3: 229-249.
Casilli, Antonio and Paola Tubaro. 2012. “Social Media Censorship in Times of Political Unrest - A Social Simulation Experiment with the UK Riots.” Bulletin of Sociological Methodology/Bulletin de Methodologie Sociologique 115, no. 1: 5-20.
Christensen, Henrik. 2011. “Political Activities on the Internet: Slacktivism or Political Participation by Other Means?” First Monday 16, no. 2: 1-10.
Copeland, Phillipe. 2015. “Let’s Get Free: Social Work and the Movement for Black Lives.” Journal of Forensic Social Work 5, no. 1-3: 3-19.
Cox, Jonathan. 2017. “The Source of a Movement: Making the Case for Social Media as an Informational Source using Black Lives Matter.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 40, no. 11: 1847-1854.
Cumbers, Andrew and Paul Routledge. 2013. “Place, Space and Solidarity in Global Justice Networks.” Spatial Politics: Essays for Doreen Massey. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons.
Davis, Angela. 2016. Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
el-Nawawy, Mohammed and Sahar Khamis. 2013. “Blogging as Cyberactivism: Introductory Themes.” Egyptian Revolution 2.0. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
el-Tantawy, Nahed and Julie Wiest. 2011. “The Arab spring| Social Media in the Egyptian Revolution: Reconsidering Resource Mobilization Theory.” International Journal of Communication 5: 1207-1224.
Elwood, Sarah and Agnieszka Leszczynski. 2013. “New Spatial Media, New Knowledge Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 38, no. 4: 544-559.
Featherstone, David. 2005. “Towards the Relational Construction of Militant Particularisms: Or Why the Geographies of Past Struggles Matter for Resistance to Neoliberal Globalisation.” Antipode 37, no. 2: 250–71.
Featherstone, David. 2012. Solidarity: Hidden Histories and Geographies of Internationalism. London: Zed Books.
Feldman, Keith. 2015. A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Frenzel, Fabian, Anna Feigenbaum, and Patrick McCurdy. 2014. “Protest Camps: An Emerging Field of Social Movement Research.” Sociological Review 62, no. 3: 457-474.
Gerbaudo, Paolo. 2012. Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism. London: Pluto Press.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. 2008. “Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning.” Engaging Contradictions: Theory, Politics, and Methods of Activist Scholarship. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Gutiérrez, Miren. 2018. Data Activism and Social Change. Cham: Palgrave Pivot.
Khazraee, Emad and James Losey. 2016. “Evolving Repertoires: Digital Media Use in Contentious Politics.” Communication and the Public 1, no. 1: 39-55.
Kitchin, Robert and Martin Dodge. 2011. “Introducing Code/Space.” Code/Space: Software and Everyday Life. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Koopman, Sarah. 2008. “Imperialism Within: Can the Master’s Tools Bring Down Empire?” ACME 7, no. 2: 283-307.
Lembke, Tobias and Michael Habegger. 2017. “A Master Institution of World Society? Digital Communications Networks and the Changing Dynamics of Transnational Contention.” International Relations: 1-25.
Leitner, Helga, Eric Sheppard, and Kristin Sziartol. 2008. “The Spatialities of Contentious Politics.” Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 33, no. 2: 157-172.
Lubin, Alex. 2014. Geographies of Liberation: The Making of an Afro-Arab Political Imaginary. Chapel Hill: UNC Press Books.
Lubin, Alex. 2016. “American Studies, the Middle East, and the Question of Palestine.” American Quarterly 68, no. 1: 1-21.
Mahesh, Vidhisha. 2017. “How the Net Neutrality Repeal is an Attack on Modern Social Activism.” Affinity. http://affinitymagazine.us/2017/11/23/how-the-net-neutrality-repeal-is-an-attack-on-modern-social-activism/ (accessed 28 January 2018).
Massey, Doreen. 2007. World City. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Massey, Doreen. 2008. “Geographies of Solidarities.” Material Geographies: A World in the Making. London: Sage Publications.
McCaughey, Martha. 2014. Cyberactivism on the Participatory Web. New York: Routledge.
Meek, David. 2012. “YouTube and Social Movements: A Phenomenological Analysis of Participation, Events and Cyberplace.” Antipode 44, no. 4: 1429-1448.
Miller, Jake. 1981. “Black Viewpoints on the Mid-East Conflict.” Journal of Palestine Studies 10, no. 2: 37-49.
Molloy, Mark. 2014. “Palestinians Tweet Tear Gas Advice to Protesters in Ferguson.” The Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/11036190/Palestinians-tweet-tear-gas-advice-to-protesters-in-Ferguson.html (accessed 04 October 2016).
Mohamed, Mohamed. 2017. “How Israel Represses the Internet in Palestine.” Mondoweiss. http://mondoweiss.net/2017/12/represses-Internet-palestine/ (accessed 28 January 2018).
Morrison, Aaron. 2017. “How Black Lives Matter Activists are Already Gearing Up to Fight the Net Neutrality Repeal.” Mic. https://mic.com/articles/186949/how-black-lives-matter-activists-are-already-gearing-up-to-fight-the-net-neutrality-repeal#.PlfzFH4U9 (accessed 29 January 2018).
Noble, Safiya. 2018. Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. New York: New York University Press.
Perri, Jonathan. 2017. “Why We Need Net Neutrality in Order to Change the World.” MashableAsia. https://mashable.com/2017/12/07/net-neutrality-digital-activism-free-speech/#SNIaccpJbiqY (accessed 29 January 2018).
Prouse, Carolyn. 2018. “Autoconstruction 2.0: Social Media Contestations of Racialized Violence in Complexo de Alemão.” Antipode 50, no. 3: 621-640.
Pulido, Laura and Juan De Lara. 2018. “Reimagining ‘Justice’ in Environmental Justice: Radical Ecologies, Decolonial Thought, and the Black Radical Tradition.” Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space 1 no. 1–2: 76–98.
Rotman, Dana, Sarah Vieweg, Sarita Yardi, Ed Chi, Jenny Preece, Ben Shneiderman, Peter Pirolli, and Tom Glaisyer. 2011. “From Slacktivism to Activism: Participatory Culture in the Age of Social Media.” CHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems: 819-822.
Routledge, Paul. 2017. Space Invaders: Radical Geographies of Protest. London: Pluto Press.
Rozema, Jaap, Matthew Cashmore, Alan Bond, and Jason Chilvers. 2015. “Respatialization and Local Protest Strategy Formation: Investigating High-speed Rail Megaproject Development in the UK.” Geoforum 59: 98-108.
Salaita, Steven. 2015. Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom. Chicago: Haymarket Books.
Shelton, Taylor. 2019. “Digital Civics.” Digital Geographies. Sage Publications: London.
Shirky, Clay. 2011. “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90, no. 1: 28-41.
Sundberg, Juanita. 2007. “Reconfiguring North-South Solidarity: Critical Reflections on Experiences of Transnational Resistance.” Antipode 39, no. 1: 144-166.
The Movement for Black Lives. n.d. “Invest-Divest.” The Movement for Black Lives. https://policy.m4bl.org/invest-divest/ (accessed 10 October 2017).
Thomas, David. 1991. “Old Rituals for New Space: Rites de Passage and William Gibson's Cultural Model of Cyberspace.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Valenzuela, Sebastián. 2013. “Unpacking the Use of Social Nedia for Protest Behavior: The Roles of Information, Opinion Expression, and Activism.” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7: 920-942.
Van De Donk, Wim, Brian Loader, Paul Nixon, and Dieter Rucht. 2004. Cyberprotest: New Media, Citizens and Social Movement. London: Routledge.
Young, Lewis. 1972. “American Blacks and the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Journal of Palestine Studies 2, no. 1: 70-85.
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2021-12-16
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Sato, M., & Moser, S. (2021). #FromFerguson2Gaza: Spatialities of Protest in Black-Palestinian Solidarity Movements. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, 21(1), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.14288/acme.v21i1.2105
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