Detours in the Elsewheres of American Empire: Hawai‘i, Puerto Rico, and Palestine

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The Detours: Decolonial Guide Series invites editorial teams to collectively vision and curate decolonial futures of place. The series seeks to disrupt hegemonic claims to place, instead centering decolonial imaginations, narratives, cartographies and aesthetics of sovereign Indigenous and Black futurities. As fascism, authoritarianism, genocide, and environmental catastrophe unfold in the throes of late-stage American empire, we highlight its “elsewheres” to theorize the critiques, socialities, and futures driven by place-based movements against US hegemony. This roundtable features one of the series editors and members of the Palestine and Puerto Rico editorial teams. The roundtable will be framed by the initial intervention that anchors the series, which centers the decolonial imaginaries, projects, and methods centered in Hawai‘i and by its people. The vision for the series grew out of a commitment to aloha ʻāina (love of land/nation), and what it means to enact aloha ʻāina from divergent social locations. The ensuing volumes take up decolonialism in the specificity of Palestine and Puerto Rico, which simultaneously illuminate the violence and failures of empire and the insurgent and creative worldmaking of people at its very front lines. In dialogue with each other and the audience, we ask: What lessons might we learn from the imperial techniques and resistance movements in Hawai‘i Palestine, and Puerto Rico? What are the challenges, barriers, failures, and joys associated with curating a public-facing, decolonial guide? What can we learn about decoloniality, solidarity, and love for land from these stories of struggle, failure, and joy? What is made possible when we move away from expertise defined by academic standards of measure to centering expertise founded upon experience and deep relationality? The series advances theoretical and methodological conceptualizations of decolonization with each volume providing examples of how to be, think, and act in relation with lands, more-than-human and human kin in homelands and in diaspora.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Vernadette Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

Panelists

• Rafael V Capó García, The University of Puerto Rico

• Jennifer L Kelly, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Marisol Lebron, University of California-Santa Cruz

• Lila A Sharif, Arizona State University-Tempe

Comment

• Vernadette Gonzalez, UC Berkeley

Biographical Information

Rafael V. Capó García is the founder and director of Memoria (De)colonial, a non-profit organization that critically examines the legacies of colonialism in Puerto Rico and the Caribbean through public and digital humanities initiatives. Dr. Capó García holds an MA in History and completed his PhD at the University of British Columbia’s Department of Curriculum Studies, where he teaches courses on education and decolonization. His dissertation critically explored the historiographical development of the narratives of racial democracy, mestizaje, and slavery in Puerto Rican intellectual history. It concludes by discussing how Caribbean forms of historical consciousness can potentially interrupt Eurocentric conceptions of heritage and entangle the relationship between Indigeneity and Blackness. In 2022, Rafael was selected as a decolonization fellow for CENTRO’s/Princeton’s inaugural Bridging the Divides study group program, which convened scholars, journalists, artists, and other intellectuals to critically examine and reimagine decolonization in Puerto Rico. Rafael was also the 2023-2024 digital humanities fellow at the University of Puerto Rico’s UPR Caribe Digital program, and currently teaches public history at its campus in Cayey. He previously worked as a public-school Social Studies teacher for 8 years in his hometown of Santurce and completed an M.A. in History in 2016. His research interests include Caribbean philosophy, (de)coloniality / (de)colonization, monuments, curriculum, public history, race and heritage, historical narratives, and Puerto Rican studies.

Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez is Professor of Ethnic Studies at University of California, Berkeley, where she coordinates the Asian American and Asian Diaspora Studies program. Her research examines the gendered and racialized cultures of U.S. empire in Asia and the Pacific with a focus on tourism and militarism. She is author of Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines (Duke UP, 2013) and Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper (Duke UP, 2021). She is co-editor of Bangtan Remixed: A Critical BTS Reader (Duke UP, 2024) and Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i (Duke UP, 2019), which anchors the Detours Series at Duke University Press. She is at work on several projects, including an open access Detours Oceania teaching guide, and a book on hospitality and its discontents.

Jennifer Lynn Kelly is an Associate Professor of Feminist Studies and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at University of California, Santa Cruz. She received her Ph.D. in American Studies with a Portfolio in Women’s and Gender Studies from University of Texas at Austin, her master’s degree in Interdisciplinary Humanities from New York University, and her bachelor's degree in Feminist Studies and Literature from University of California, Santa Cruz. Her research broadly engages questions of settler colonialism, U.S. empire, and the fraught politics of both tourism and solidarity. Her first book, Invited to Witness: Solidarity Tourism Across Occupied Palestine (Duke University Press, 2023), is a multi-sited interdisciplinary study of solidarity tourism in Palestine that shows how solidarity tourism has emerged in Palestine as an organizing strategy that is both embedded in and working against histories of sustained displacement. Her next project, co-edited with Somdeep Sen (Rothskilde University) and Lila Sharif (Arizona State University) is Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Palestine, the next volume in the Detours Series at Duke University Press. She is also a Founding Collective member of the Institute for the Critical Study of Zionism and UCSC’s Faculty for Justice in Palestine.

Marisol LeBrón is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research and teaching focus on race, social inequality, policing, violence, and protest. She is an Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of Policing Life and Death: Race, Violence, and Resistance in Puerto Rico (University of California Press, 2019) and Against Muerto Rico: Lessons from the Verano Boricua (Editora Educación Emergente, 2021). She is also the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (Haymarket Books, 2019). She is currently working on a book that explores the centrality of policing to the emergence and consolidation of Latinx identity in the United States.

Lila Sharif (she/her/hers) is assistant professor at the School of Social Transformation at Arizona State University. She is a Palestinian writer, educator, researcher, poet and scholar based in the Phoenix area. Her research is located at the intersection of critical refugee studies, global feminism, and Indigenous studies of Southwest Asia with an emphasis on the food, land, epistemologies, and ecologies of Palestine. Sharif won the ASA’s best essay prize in 2024 for her essay “On Sophicide”. She has co-authored Departures (UC Press, 2021) along with Dr. Lan Duong and the Critical Refugee Studies Collective. Her recent publications include a comparative study of Palestinian and Vietnamese cinema, an analysis of Gazan food as a site of feminist struggle during genocide, the afterlives of the War on Terror, and a global intersectional approach to analyzing race and the environment. Most recently, Sharif co-edited Detours: A Decolonial Guidebook of Palestine with Jennifer Kelly and Somdeep Sen, which is forthcoming with Duke University Press. Her forthcoming book Olive Skins (University of Minnesota Press) analyzes the ways in which erasure and recognition inform Palestinian life, and how Palestinian women continue to mediate the relationship between the Palestinian people and their homeland, through everyday food practices, the transmission of memory, and the everyday work of Return.