Meet the 2020-21 Fellows in Conflict and Peace: Taurean Webb

My name is Taurean Webb. I am on faculty at Garrett Seminary, on the campus of Northwestern University. There, I teach religion and race, and I also direct the campus research center that is dedicated to the study of Black religious experience across the African diaspora.

I was drawn to the RCPI because there seemed to be no other place with such an impressive critical mass of thinkers, working on questions related to Palestine and global solidarity. Surely, there are academic centers, at other major R1s, dedicated to the academic study of Palestine. But the RCPI, to me, seemed to embody something a bit different – very much an eclectic mix of scholars, activists, artists (and other creatives), collaboratively working towards both rigorous study and a just peace in-region. And that was compelling to me.

For years, I’ve worked in both the Movement for Black Lives and the global movement for the liberation of Palestine. My RCPI project attempts to continue in this vein of the deep, deep histories of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity.

The project produces a traveling visual arts exhibition, featuring artists of the Palestinian and African diasporas, working in paint, photography, sketch, digital media and installation. The show, entitled ‘Ye Shall Inherit the Earth & Faces of the Divine’ will open at Harvard in Spring 2021—hopefully, in person—then travel across the US northeast, eastern seaboard and Midwest. Thematically, the exhibition is both a tribute to the histories, as well as the ways in which the everyday, ordinary, quotidian human experience can come to reflect the divine.