Facing Devolution and Death with Insurgent Politics of Rebirth

• In Event: Beyond Settler Nations: Sites and Relations of Indigenous Im/migrant Solidarity 

Abstract

This paper brings together critical considerations of immigration, citizenship, anti-Arab/Palestinian and anti-Mexican racism through an analysis of Netflix series Mo. Two-part series, Mo narrates a story of an undocumented Palestinian family in Texas seeking asylum in the United States, navigating an all too common, yet chilling dual experience of settler colonialism and imperialism. The series is drizzled well with humor, comedy, and romance as it points to obvious realities of two, overlapping, violent systems of settler colonialism, imperialism, and necropolitcs: US land dispossession and Indigenous genocide and slavery, Israeli/European settler colonialism, apartheid, genocide, and imperialism, and the US-Mexico border, and the settler occupation of Palestine, that is riddled with checkpoints and borders. Further the romantic relationship between the protagonist, Mohammad Najjar, and a Mexican American citizen, Maria, draws dynamic parallels between indigenous foods respective of their own cultures: guacamole and hummus, and cilantro and parsley, and comparative racializations as well as indigenous erasures in relation to white supremacist, settler colonial, imperialist notions of citizenship. This paper thus, spotlights such parallels, and puts forth an argument that centers multiple Indigeneities against a critique of settler citizenship, both US and Israeli. Such an analysis is timely given the devolution of empires and their so-called propagandized democracies. While dominant frameworks such as citizenship are cemented deep within the American psyche, Mo offers astute and deft interrogations of what settler citizenship really means, and it will do us well to contemplate anti-necropolitical ways of belonging and relating.

Author

• Raquel González Madrigal