La La Lil Jidar presents:
Visualization as a Language of Resistance
Book Launch and Conversation about the new book
Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation
Featuring Jessica Anderson (Visualizing Palestine)
and Professor Huda Fakhreddine (UPenn)
moderated by Aisha Mershani (La La Lil Jidar)
Saturday, November 16
Doors and food at 7:30pm, event at 8:00pm
All proceeds support the Gaza Scholarship Initiative
Click here for tickets or to make a donation
Please join La La Lil Jidar at Studio34 with Visualizing Palestine deputy director Jessica Anderson and Professor Huda Fakhreddine in conversation, moderated by Aisha Mershani from La La Lil Jidar, for the book launch of Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation. In addition to discussing the book, Jessica and Huda will explore where the movement for Palestine is today, solidarity with other movements, and the importance of narrative, in all its forms, to fight colonial oppression. The conversation will weave in critical themes including gentrification and police brutality that affect Studio 34’s community, highlighting the intersectionality of movements for justice and liberation.
Come early to mingle, eat/drink, and purchase merchandise, including: La La Lil Jidar posters, Palestine art, and copies of both Visualizing Palestine and Palestinian.
Published by Haymarket Books,Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation is a striking, 400-page collection of 200+ full-color infographics, reflecting over a decade of collaboration by 160+ VP contributors.
Palestinian, by award-winning poet and novelist Ibrahim Nasrallah and translated from Arabic by Huda J. Fakhreddine, is written during an ongoing genocide in Gaza. These four new poems call out the world’s blindness towards Palestine, its tragedy, and the Nakba that has persisted since 1948.
All ticket sales and proceeds from merchandise will support the Gaza Scholarship Initiative, a mutual aid fundraiser for university students from/in Gaza. This is a sliding scale fundraiser with the goal to reach $5,000.
The Gaza Scholarship Initiative (GSI) is a coalition of volunteers — academics, writers, and concerned individuals — who have supported over 70 displaced university students from Gaza. Our mission is to safeguard Palestinian futures by supporting displaced Palestinian students from Gaza who must seek education abroad. By investing in these students now, we aim to create future leaders who can eliminate the need to leave Gaza for quality education and support the rebuilding process in Palestine. We also support academics and initiatives working to restore academic learning in Gaza, both virtually and otherwise.
About Jessica Anderson
Jessica Anderson is a human rights researcher based in Michigan. Since 2013, she has been working with Visualizing Palestine, an organization that uses data and research to visually communicate Palestinian experiences to provoke narrative change. Alongside Aline Batarseh and Yosra El-Gazzar, Jessica is a co-editor of the new book Visualizing Palestine: A Chronicle of Colonialism and the Struggle for Liberation, published by Haymarket Books.
About Huda J. Fakhreddine
Huda J. Fakhreddine is a writer, translator, and Associate Professor of Arabic Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of Metapoesis in the Arabic Tradition (Brill, 2015) and The Arabic Prose Poem: Poetic Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2021), and the co-editor of The Routledge Handbook of Arabic Poetry (Routledge, 2023). Her book of creative non-fiction titled Zaman saghīr taḥt shams thāniya (A Brief Time under a Different Sun) was published by Dar al-Nahda, Beirut in 2019. Her translations of Arabic poems have appeared in Banipal, World Literature Today, Nimrod, ArabLit Quarterly, Asymptote, and Middle Eastern Literatures among many others. She is co-editor of Middle Eastern Literatures and an editor of the Library of Arabic Literature.
About Aisha Mershani
Aisha Mershani is the lead artist in La La Lil Jidar, producing the photography collection called La La Lil Jidar: 20 Years Behind the Apartheid Wall. Aisha Mershani (they/them) was born in Las Vegas, Nevada to an American Jewish mother and a Moroccan Muslim father. Mershani holds a Bachelor’s degree in Sociology and Anthropology from the University of Redlands in California, and a Master’s and a Ph.D. degree from the UNESCO program in Peace, Development Studies, and Conflict Transformation <https://www.uji.es/estudis/oferta/base/doctorat/actual/pau/> at the Universitat Jaume I in Castellón de la Plana, Spain.
About Visualizing Palestine
We use data and research to visually communicate Palestinian experiences to provoke narrative change. We envision a liberated future for Palestinians in a world free from oppression. Visualizing Palestine creates narrative interventions that convey the urgent and the actionable. We strive to capture not just stories of struggle, but of solidarity, sumud (steadfastness), and inspiration. Our visual tools ensure that factual, liberatory narratives about Palestine are visible, accessible, and interconnected with those of other movements working for collective liberation.