This conversation draws on themes from Resisting Erasure: Capital, Imperialism and Race in Palestine (Verso 2025) to explore how Palestine is framed and sometimes rendered unspeakable within contemporary intellectual and public life. Taking the concept of neutrality as a starting point, the discussion will reflect on how claims to objectivity and balance can function to obscure settler-colonial violence and reproduce forms of anti-Palestinian racism.

The conversation will consider how Palestinian writers have imagined, written, and spoken against erasure, drawing on anti-colonial traditions to challenge silence and reassert the possibility of intellectual and political solidarity.

Dr Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian poet, activist and researcher. She is Senior Lecturer in Politics and Public Policy at Kings College London, where her research focuses broadly on political economy, gender and race, with a particular focus on the Middle East and East Africa. Rafeef is co-editor (with Brenna Bhandar) of the book Revolutionary Feminisms (2020).

Dr Sara Marzagora is Senior Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Kings College London. She is a literary and intellectual historian of Ethiopia and the Horn of Africa. Sara has co-edited the volume Oral Literary Worlds: Location, Transmission and Circulation (with Francesca Orsini, 2025) and is currently completing a book titled The True Meaning of Independence: Ethiopia in a Colonial World (1901-1919).

"Diversifying the Canon to Recover Humanity’s Past: The Case of Pre-colonial Andean": An Essay by Jorge Sanchez-Perez (Keywords: Erasure; Colonialism;Epistemic injustice;Indigenous Epistemologies)

"Rituals of Disappearance" by Roddy Brett (Keywords: Disappeared Bodies; Genocide; State Terrorism; Erasure; Rituals)

THE PHILOSOPHER

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