Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial

Saree Makdisi is the Chair of the Department of English at UCLA

The Department of Jewish, Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (JIMES) at Washington University of St. Louis is proud to host a talk from Prof. Saree Makdisi of UCLA.

The question that this talk invites us to think through might seem simple: how can a violent project of dispossession and discrimination be imagined, felt, and profoundly believed in as though it were the exact opposite––an embodiment of sustainability, multicultural tolerance, and democratic idealism? Despite well-documented evidence of racism and human rights abuse, Israel has long been embraced by the most liberal sectors of European and American society as a manifestation of the progressive values of tolerance, plurality, inclusivity, and democracy, and hence a project that can be passionately defended for its lofty ideals. The talk will explore the cultural and representational processes that sustain this form of denial.

This event is free and open to the public.

The event will begin with a reception at 5:30 p.m.

About the Speaker

Professor Makdisi’s teaching and research are situated at the crossroads of several different fields, including British Romanticism, imperial culture, colonial and postcolonial theory and criticism, and the cultures of urban modernity, particularly the revision and contestation of charged urban spaces, including London, Beirut and Jerusalem. He has also written extensively on the afterlives of colonialism in the contemporary Arab world, and, in addition to his scholarly articles, has also contributed pieces on current events to a number of newspapers and magazines, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the London Review of Books.

His most recent book is Tolerance is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial (University of California Press, 2022). He is also the author of Reading William Blake (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Making England Western: Occidentalism, Race, and Imperial Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2014); Palestine Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation (Norton, 2010); William Blake and the Impossible History of the 1790s (University of Chicago Press, 2003); and Romantic Imperialism (Cambridge University Press, 1998). He is presently working on a new book project, London’s Modernities, on the mapping and unmapping of London from the nineteenth century to the present.