Join us for an insightful afternoon with Dr. Lana Tatour as she discusses her latest edited volume, Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press 2025). This talk explores the critical intersections of settler colonialism and the grammar of race, examining how racial structures operate as a technology of power and colonial rule.
About the Book: This book develops from the position that the colonization of Palestine—like other imperial and settler colonial projects—cannot be understood outside the grammar of race. Race and the Question of Palestine (Stanford University Press 2025) explores how race operates as a technology of power and colonial rule, a political and economic structure, a set of legal and discursive practices, and a classificatory system. Offering a wide-ranging set of essays by historians, legal scholars, political scientists, sociologists, literary scholars, and race critical theorists, this collection illuminates how race should be understood in terms of its political work, and not as an identity category interchangeable with ethnicity, culture, or nationalism. Essays build on a long-standing tradition of theorizing race in Palestine studies and speak to four interconnected themes—the politics of racialization and regimes of race, racism and antiracism, race and capital accumulation, and Black–Palestinian solidarity. These engagements challenge the exceptionalism of the Palestinian case, and stress the importance of locating Palestine within global histories and present politics of imperialism, settler colonialism, capitalism, and heteropatriarchy
About the Speaker: Lana Tatour is a Senior Lecturer in Global Development at the University of New South Wales. She is a scholar of settler colonialism, indigeneity, race, and citizenship, with a focus on Palestine. Her coedited book, Race and the Question of Palestine was published in 2025 with Stanford University Press. She is currently completing her monograph, Colonized Citizens: Liberalism, Settler Colonialism, and Palestinian resistance. Lana is also a public commentator. She has appeared on ABC News, the BBC, and TRT World, and her publications have appeared in The Guardian, Al-Jazeera, Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, The Age, Overland, and more.
