To Heal and Care Amidst State Violence: Theorizing Kinship from Alternate Spaces

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

In the days and months after the 2024 election, people lamented the violent end of American democracy. Within an undeniably turbulent political shift, historical perspectives reminded us that America has often been in crisis, and that this is the latest in a steady erosion of the empire’s public face. Regardless of the platform, however, a refrain rang out amidst the grief and fear: turn to your community. In the first chapter of Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care, longtime organizers and theorists Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba write: “Effective organizing…does not begin with having the most compelling argument or the most dazzling direct action, but with developing the capacity to bring people into relationship with one another” (59). Being in community allows for increased investment in building better supports, possibilities, and hopes, which then lay the ground for better futures. In this panel, we consider neither the potential death throes of the empire, nor the creative ground crisis so often precipitates. Instead, we consider continuation. Our panelists explore models of kinship which work around and against the limitations of the state. Through their work, they demonstrate the importance of not just imagining other ways of being, but of amplifying communities who are already creating networks of care illegible to American empire.

Drawing on the work of Survived and Punished, an organization which Mariame Kaba has long been involved in, Linda Zhang writes on the urgency of abolitionary praxis in thinking through kinship models. She considers criminalized domestic violence survivors, working to understand how new relationships are built within a system designed to punish victims. Kara Roanhorse also takes up networks of care within communities actively targeted by a violent state. Her work centers the spatiotemporal relationships of Indigenous youth, arguing that their kinships prove care is a “relational commitment rather than a settler commodity”. They both take up Kim TallBear’s essential question: “What is possible with a model in which love and relations are not considered scarce objects to be hoarded and protected, but which proliferate beyond the confines of the socially constituted couple and nuclear family?” (“Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family,” 2018, 163). Finally, Natalie El-Eid analyzes kinship networks which already proliferate far beyond the spatial and temporal limitations of settler frameworks. She explores the intimacies cultivated within Druze communities across reincarnated families and selves. Together, these papers look at how populations subjected to state violence at the hands of US empire care for each other. They analyze methods of kinship which double as spaces of resistance, theorizing forms of care which can help carry us through the present moment and into a brighter future. As Hayes and Kaba write, “As old worldviews fall away, new worlds must be built” (61). The building has already begun.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• Moving Towards Abolitionist Futures of Kinship and Care in Domestic Violence Services - Linda Zhang, University of California-Los Angeles

• Interstellar Stories & Cosmic Encounters of Indigenous Youth: In the Space Between Stars and Sovereignty - Kara Grace Roanhorse, University of New Mexico-Main Campus

• Reimagining Kinship in Transnational Stories of Reincarnation - Natalie G El-Eid, Georgetown University

Chair

• Shebati Sengupta, University of New Mexico

Comment

• Danika Fawn Medak-Saltzman, Syracuse University

Biographical Information

Linda Zhang (she/her) is a M.A. student in the Asian American Studies program at the University of California, Los Angeles. Prior to attending UCLA, she completed her bachelor’s at Mount Holyoke College. Her research interests focus on the role of domestic violence shelters under the nonprofit industrial complex, primarily those serving Asian American and immigrant survivors, in policing survivors and creating conditionalities for receiving care. In particular, she is curious about how the increasing professionalization of domestic violence services has impacted survivors’ access to care.

Kara Roanhorse, Diné, is a Ph.D. Candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. She grew up in Tó'hajiilee, New Mexico, where she calls home. She is Tł’ááshchí’í (Red Cheek clan), born for Ta’neeszahnii (Tangle clan). Kara is currently working on multiple projects focused on Critical Indigenous studies, Black, Indigenous, and queer feminisms, disability, and youth resistance across time and space. Her dissertation project explores the intersections of 20th to 21st-century feminist care work and praxis, Diné studies methods of poetics/storytelling, and the critical invocations of health sovereignty. With six years of experience in public health, she remains committed to Indigenous youth, a purpose that continues to shape her scholarship and writing.

Natalie El-Eid (she/her) specializes in contemporary transnational literatures and cultures of the Arab world, focusing her research on diverse and interdisciplinary textualizations of transnational Arab identities, cultures, and lived experiences across racial and ethnic frameworks and solidarities. In her current book project, titled “Druze Afterlives: Between Bodies and Borders,” Natalie examines stories she has curated from transnational Druze communities in the U.S. and Lebanon pertaining to the Druze’s fundamental ethnoreligious belief in reincarnation. In her work, Natalie introduces the concept of "Druze afterlives" to provide a new way of understanding how empire, war, trauma, memory, and gender intersect within and across the borders, bodies, and stories of the transnational Arab world, particularly in relation to what she frames as the “ongoing Lebanese Civil War.” Natalie is currently the American Druze Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University. She is a former instructor of Women’s & Gender studies and a Graduate Research Associate in the Middle Eastern Studies Program at Syracuse University, where she earned her PhD in English.

Danika Medak-Saltzman is assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, and faculty affiliate of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Program and the Center for Global Indigenous Cultures and Environmental Justice at Syracuse University. Her work spans American Studies, pop culture, Indigenous studies, feminist futures, disability studies, transnational Indigeneity, comparative settler-colonialisms, as well as media and visual cultural studies. Her current book project examines the transnational movement of American colonial policies–particularly in the case of Japan—and deploys a critical Indigenous studies lens to consider how what she calls the “specters of colonialism,” that function to hide the human cost of colonialism, help to obscure what she describes as the “inter-imperial intimacies” animating global colonialism in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. Medak-Saltzman has published widely, placing articles in American Quarterly, The Journal of Critical Ethnic Studies, Studies in American Indian Literature, Verge: Studies in Global Asias, Critical Asian Studies, Feminist Formations, and most recently in the new feminist journal Gatherings. Alongside Iyko Day of Mount Holyoke College, Antonio T. Tiongson, Jr. of Syracuse University, and Shanté Paradigm Smalls of NYU, Medak-Saltzman is co-editor of the “Critical Race, Indigeneity and Relationality” book series for Temple University Press. Medak-Saltzman is also co-PI on a National Science Foundation grant (through the NSF’s Arctic Social Sciences Division) with PI Chie Sakakibara of Syracuse University where they are working on a project called “Indigenous Northern Landscapes, Visual Repatriation, and Collaborative Knowledge Exchange” that is currently in its second of three funded years.

Shebati Sengupta (they/she) is a PhD Candidate in American Studies at the University of New Mexico. Their dissertation focuses on Asian American embodiment during COVID-19, relating the corporeal experiences of state violence and mutual aid to performances of US sovereignty. Her research interests include speculative fiction, Asian American futurisms, and poetry, which they understand as ways of theorizing alternate worlds and ontologies. At UNM, Shebati is a TA for the WGSS Program. Previously, she has taught Intro to Politics in Popular Culture and Intro to Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. They also developed and taught the first iteration of Intro to Asian American Studies ever offered at UNM. Right now, Shebati is the co-graduate student representative for the Association for Asian American Studies Feminisms Caucus. In the past, they’ve held fellowships at Roots, Wounds, Words, for speculative fiction; VONA, for poetry; and the Center for Black, Brown, and Queer Studies. Shebati was also the 2024 Garlic Poet Laureate for the Toronto Garlic Festival, where she learned a lot about her favorite allium.