Black Palestine, Indigenous Palestine: On the Logics of Antiblackness and Settler Colonialism

• In Event: Being and Blackness

Abstract

The field of American studies has recently taken up longstanding indigenous critiques of ethnic studies scholarship that does not sufficiently account for histories of settler colonialism. Concurrently, a body of work known as "Afro-pessimism" has emerged that frames anti-black violence as the foundational mode of racial capitalism. These two turns are in some ways incommensurable—the axiomatic distinction in the former is indigenous/settler, while in the latter it is black/non-black. This paper places the two fields into conversation using the example of Palestine, which has been described as both a black struggle and an indigenous struggle. The poet June Jordan, black American by way of Jamaica, once wrote, "I was born a Black woman / and now / I am become a Palestinian" in response to the Sabra and Shatila massacres. Jordan was not expressing sympathy in the abstract, but rather recognizing the shared precariousness of black and Palestinian life vis-a-vis the violence of settler colonialism. Identifying with these lines, the Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad titled her first collection of poems Born Palestinian, Born Black. She offered as explanation that black could mean "Indians in England, Africans in America, / Algerians in France, and Palestinians in Israel." Forms of black and indigenous mutual identification emerge too in the language of Israeli apartheid and analogies to Jim Crow, but for the most part such forms are subordinated to a nationalist black history that unproblematically narrates the progression from slavery to full incorporation into the US nation-state, marked most significantly by the ascent of Barack Obama. Similarly, some indigenous history has failed to acknowledge that slavery, both African and non-African, provided the context in which physical, cultural, and linguistic differences were calcified into racial cartographies in late medieval and early modern Europe, which coincided with the settlement of the Americas. This paper argues that we might recover Jordan and Hammad's alternative genealogy by claiming anti-imperialism and indigenous solidarity as a critical foundation of black history, as when, during Obama's recent visit to Israel, Palestinian protesters marked their disgust by wearing masks of his likeness and carrying signs that read "Obama, the Hitler of the 21st century." More broadly, I ask how solidarity between black and Palestinian people can denaturalize the logic of American imperial multiculturalism and challenge the notion that helming an empire is a model of black success.

Author

• Justin Leroy, Harvard University (MA)