Locating palestine within American studies: Transitory field sites and borrowed methods

Abstract

This chapter charts my circuitous arrival at solidarity tourism in Palestine as my subject of study and details how I fashioned a program of fieldwork from within the field of American Studies. I describe the stitching together of resources that enabled my fieldwork alongside fragments of interviews and field notes in order to trace the processes that allowed me to see solidarity tourism as a business and strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement in Palestine. I thus show how my approach has treated fieldwork as interdisciplinarity, centralizing Palestine within American Studies and crafting an ethnographic practice shaped by a study of empire that exceeds the boundaries of disciplinary training.