FEB 17 | 6:30pm at McNally Jackson Seaport
Mohammed El-Kurd presents Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, in conversation with Fred Moten
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Perfect Victims is an urgent affirmation of the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal―an ode to the steadfastness of a nation.
Palestine is a microcosm of the world: on fire, stubborn, fragmented, dignified. While a settler colonial state continues to inflict devastating violence, fundamental truths are deliberately obscured--the perpetrators are coddled while the victims are blamed and placed on trial.
Why must Palestinians prove their humanity? And what are the implications of such an infuriatingly impossible task? With fearless prose and lyrical precision, Mohammed El-Kurd refuses a life spent in cross-examination. Rather than asking the oppressed to perform a perfect victimhood, El-Kurd asks friends and foes alike to look Palestinians in the eye, forgoing both deference and condemnation.
How we see Palestine reveals how we see each other; how we see everything else. Masterfully combining candid testimony, history, and reportage, Perfect Victims presents a powerfully simple demand: dignity for the Palestinian.
Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer, poet, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. He is the Nation’s first-ever Palestine Correspondent and editor-at-large at Mondoweiss, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and the author of the highly-acclaimed poetry collection Rifqa, which has been translated into several languages.
Fred Moten studies the social practice of poetry/criticism. He lives in New York and teaches at New York University. His most recent work, in collaboration with Brandon López and Gerald Cleaver, is the blacksmiths, the flowers (Reading Group Records, 2024).
The Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) is a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for dismantling colonialism in the 21st century. It has run an annual international festival in Palestine since 2008.
Haymarket Books is a radical, independent, nonprofit book publisher based in Chicago with a mission to publish books that contribute to struggles for social and economic justice. Haymarket strives to make their books a vibrant and organic part of social movements and the education and development of a critical, engaged, and internationalist Left.