PARC sponsored MESA Panel: “Palestine and Constellations of Indigeneity”
Former Palestinian president Yasser Arafat once said, “Israel has failed to wipe us out… We are not red Indians.” This panel turns to Palestinian and Native American organizers, cultural workers, and critical theorists who refuse such foreclosures of solidarity without romanticizing the latter or evacuating it of the antagonisms that haunt it. Rather than frame solidarity as oppositional to critique, the panel embraces a radical tradition that considers critiques of imperial counterinsurgency (continental and overseas) indispensable to transnational anticolonial organizing. How does interrogating the historical relationship between Palestine and Indigenous North America help us understand the rise of terrorism as a social and political discursive category? Critical inquiries into coloniality are just as urgent as the aforementioned genealogies of colonialism. Put otherwise, transnational Indigenous solidarity demands examining the political-economic as well as onto-epistemological arrangements that undergird Native elimination. Doing so entails contouring the coloniality of anticolonial movements that pragmatically traffic in political grammars that aim (though fail) to extinguish Indigenous nations across North America. How, if at all, might those Indigenous to Palestine engage the epistemologies and ontologies of those Indigenous to North America without engaging in primitivist deracination? Such anti-imperial immanent critique of colonial macro-structures is a necessary though insufficient condition of internationalist struggle. Practicing and theorizing solidarity also demands an account of micro-processes of subjectification. How do reciprocal acts of solidarity across Indigenous movements shape the formation of political subjectivities? Challenging normative frameworks produced by settler states, this panel illuminates the intimacies of both imperial dispossession and transnational solidarity.
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