Vulnerable Targets: Statelessness and Solidarity from the Americas to Palestine

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

This panel challenges how “late-stage empire” perpetuates statelessness. Specifically, we expand upon what Jamaica Kincaid describes as the colonial condition of “small spaces” (i.e. the Caribbean islands) denied full self-governance rights by placing in conversation Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Guantánamo, Guam and Palestine. By comparing these spaces, geographically disconnected but subject to the same forces of U.S. extraterritorial governance and militarism, the panel draws upon Puerto Rico’s long-established solidarity with Hawaii’s history (islands subject to decrees from the U.S. “mainland”) and sense of kinship with the Palestinian liberation movement. Thus, we re-think what Antonio Benitez Rojo dubbed “la isla que se repite” (i.e. Caribbean islands) to reflect upon potential solidarity now between Hawaii, Pacific Island, and the occupied homeland of Palestine.

Drawing from this spirit, the panel brings forth historical, literary, political, queer, and feminist links between these spaces. For example, Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel introduces the notion of “archipelagos” to stir a conversation about how a historical study of the dual exploitation and movement of labor between Puerto Rico and Hawaii provokes questions of inquiry between similar geographic forms. Taking note also of the histories of migration between SWANA and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, we consider also the stateless present between these regions, its interlocking diasporas, as well as how anti-Arab and anti-Latinx rhetoric converge. Nada Elia’s paper establishes the importance of organizing transnational and feminist alliances between stateless or quasi-stateless sites to realize the full scope of what Palestinian liberation entails. We also reflect on the centering of “indigenous rights” between Palestine, Hawaii, and the Pacific Islands. The understanding of Pacific Islanders, many Hawaiians, and Palestinians as “indigenous” asserts their right to self-governance, self-determination, and a territorial homeland.

Some of the guiding questions of the panel aspires to provoke for discussion re: what scholarly frameworks enable thinking of historical colonialism and “late-stage empire” in Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Palestine in relation. A comparative analysis between these dislocated sites excavates the specific dimensions of American empire (its laws, environmental violence, greed, carceral monstrosity, consumerism, and militarism). Munia Bhaumik’s paper turns to the shared affective echoes in Puerto Rican and Palestinian poetry to illuminate a new notion of stateless rights.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• “Archipelagic Intra-colonial Solidarities: Puerto Ricans in Hawai‘I” - Yolanda M Martinez-San Miguel, University of Miami

• “Viva Palestina!”: The new international and poetics of rights from puerto rico to Filastin” - Munia Bhaumik, UCLA

• "Palestinian feminist organizing beyond the nation-state." - Nada Elia

• Untilted - Unlited Ulisted

Chair

• Nitasha Sharma, Northwestern University

Biographical Information

Nada Elia is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies, specializing in transnational, decolonial, and gender struggles, with a focus on Arab America and Palestine. Elia has published numerous editorials about Palestine, gender, activism, and transnational struggles in Mondoweiss, Middle East Eye, and The New Arab, among other independent media websites. A scholar-activist, Elia is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and the author of Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine, Palestine: Un feminism de liberation, as well as Trances, Dances, and Vociferations:  Agency and Resistance in Africana Women’s Narratives, and is currently completing a third single-authored Book, “Falastiniyyat: A Century of Palestinian Feminisms.” Her books, in French and English, have been translated into Spanish, Italian, and Catalan. She has co-edited the Critical Ethnic Studies: A Reader, the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence Activist Toolkit, as well as the award-winning The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, and has contributed chapters to numerous anthologies, including, most recently, Palestine:  A Socialist Introduction.

Yolanda Martínez-San Miguel specializes in colonial, postcolonial Latin American, and Caribbean literature. She teaches courses on critical theory, comparative coloniality, gender and sexuality studies, and Latinx, Latin American, and Caribbean studies. She has taught at Princeton University (1997-2000), Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (2000-2003; 2008-2017), and the University of Pennsylvania (2003-2008). She recently co-edited two volumes: (with Michelle Stephens) Contemporary Archipelagic Thinking: Towards New Comparative Methodologies and Disciplinary Formations (Rowman and Littlefield, 2020) (https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781786612779/Contemporary-Archipelagic-Thinking-Towards-New-Comparative-Methodologies-and-Disciplinary-Formations) and (with Santa Arias), The Routledge Companion to Colonial Latin American and Caribbean Studies (Routledge 2021) (https://www.routledge.com/The-Routledge-Hispanic-Studies-Companion-to-Colonial-Latin-America-and/Miguel-Arias/p/book/9781138092952). She is currently working on her fifth book, “Archipiélagos de Ultramar: Comparative Insular and Colonial Studies,” which uses comparative archipelagic studies as a historical and theoretical framework to propose a research agenda for the study of cultural productions in the Caribbean and other colonial archipelagoes between 1498 and 2010. She is co-editor of the book series on Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University Press.

Munia Bhaumik is the Program Director of Mellon Social Justice Curricular Initiatives and an award-winning scholar of comparative literature, politics, and law. An alumna of UCLA, where she received her M.A. in Urban Planning, her research and teaching critiques racial and gender inequities as well as the multiple social factors impacting whose lives count before the law. Thus, as an academic researcher, she rethinks citizenship and democracy theory from the perspective of vulnerability, considering how marginalized noncitizen refugees, migrant workers, incarcerated persons, and undocumented (child) detainees are crucial social actors. Dr. Bhaumik received her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Berkeley before joining the faculty at Emory University in Atlanta where she engaged with new Asian/Latinx immigrant and African American community voting rights alliances in the South, while also developing a vibrant undergraduate degree program in comparative literature and critical theory. Based on her research about noncitizens as the “uncounted,” data and democracy, as well as on poetry as political action across the Global South, she received the prestigious Stanford Humanities Center, Herman Melville Society, and Cornell Society for the Humanities faculty awards. Prior to entering academia, Dr. Bhaumik also spent a decade as a primarily Spanish-speaking labor/community organizer on the staff of leading progressive organizations in Los Angeles shaping national debates about social justice through direct action. Her academic book, In Liberty’s Shadow: The Noncitizen in American Letters and Law, deploys close literary and theoretical readings of seminal literary and philosophical texts defining American political culture before 1900 to argue for a new democratic ethos of recognition for our present. Equally motivated by the humanities as by social movements, particularly the ethical dilemmas communities-of-color are mobilizing in this global (post)metropolis, her work brings to attention research protocols in alliance with the demands for abolition and noncitizen citizenship as well as multilingual, queer, migrant, worker, healthcare, and Black equal rights.