To Exist as a Problem: Being Black, Being Palestinian
Zahi Zalloua
Ingraham 206
Drawing on W. E. B. Du Bois’s question, “How does it feel to be a problem?”, Professor Zahi Zalloua (Whitman College) examines the shared experiences of Black and Palestinian people as groups racialized as threats. He argues that anti-Blackness and anti-Palestinian racism are foundational to systems of white and settler dominance, casting Black people as criminals and Palestinians as terrorists to justify oppression. Rather than accepting these imposed identities, his book Exist as a Problem argues for a politics of solidarity that centers Black and Palestinian liberation in the struggle against structural racism.
Zahi Zalloua is Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Director of IRES at Whitman College. He is also Editor of The Comparatist. His recent teaching and scholarship engage Critical Black Studies, the Posthuman, and the Palestinian Question. His current book project, titled The Politics of the Wretched, investigates ressentiment, a form of resentment that springs from historical dispossession and that is too often dismissed as dangerous or unproductive for activism and politics. Zalloua argues instead that the “public use of ressentiment” allows us to universalize our grievances and turn personal trauma into a common cause: that of the wretched of the earth.