Resisting Empire: Transnational Currents of Solidarity Across Palestine’s Ard, Hawai‘i’s ‘Āina, and Turtle Island

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

The past twenty-five months have been marked by an intensified brutality for Palestinians, both those living through the relentless escalation of the ongoing Nakba in Palestine and those scattered across the shatat. This period has witnessed not only an eruption of transnational solidarity with the Palestinian struggle but also an equally forceful surge of anti-Palestinian racism—unfolding across scales that are intimate and institutional, national and global, seeping into the granular fabric of daily life and the vast machinery of state power.

This roundtable seeks to excavate the tectonic shifts of this moment—its ruptures, its reverberations, its stubborn possibilities for solidarity that refuse to be buried. We collectively ask: How does living within settler states—structures foundational to both the occupation and the ongoing genocide—shape the contours and contradictions of transnational solidarity? How do land-based practices, rooted in the ard of Palestine, the ʻĀina of Hawai‘i and the vast territories of Turtle Island, pulse beneath and beyond borders, offering not just metaphors but material anchors for collective resistance? How might scholars cultivate solidarity praxes that do more than critique, functioning instead as insurgent responses to the academic and state surveillance regimes that seek to discipline, punish, and disappear anti-colonial thought within higher education? And in defying the relational architectures imposed by coloniality, what alternative ways of being, knowing, and struggling together emerge—what subterranean networks, what insurgent kinships, what coalitional possibilities might take root across the fractured geographies we inhabit and reach toward?

The discussants in this roundtable are poised to trace transnational decolonial resistance and the hidden currents that flow beneath empires’s surface, currents that carry with them the seeds of something otherwise. Nina Shoman-Dajani will delineate the urgency and influence of Palestinian solidarity utilizing the examples set by the coalitions in Chicago and those of Kanaka Maoli scholars, activists and allies in Hawai’i; Chandni Desai pays attention to global resistances against the scholasticide in Palestine; Lucy El-Sherif examines embodied solidarities through dabke, where its physicality and communal necessity root connections to ard while forging somatic and affective relationships; Nadia Ben-Youssef draws connections between generative/disruptive solidarity movements in the last decade by examining historical moments of world building by the Global South; Cynthia Franklin illuminates the ways that song, poetry, and storytelling cannot be severed from, but rather participate in, circuits of solidarity that unite Hawai‘i and Palestine not simply as akin but kin in resisting occupation and settler colonialism.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Uahikea Maile, University of Chicago

Panelists

• Nina Shoman-Dajani, Moraine Valley Community College

• Cynthia Franklin, University of Hawai'i

• Lucy El-Sherif, McMaster University

• Nadia Ben-Youssef, Center for Constitutional Rights

• Chandni Desai, University of Toronto

Comment

• Jamaica Heoliemeleikalani Osorio, University of Hawai'i

Biographical Information

(In alphabetical order)
Nadia Ben-Youssef is an immigrant of Tunisian and Spanish descent and the granddaughter of artists, refugees, and revolutionaries who resisted the forces of colonialism and fascism in the 20th century, and sought to disrupt their evolution. A human rights lawyer by training, Nadia recognizes her role as attending to the unfinished business of her ancestors and raising her daughter in this legacy of world building. She currently serves as the Advocacy Director at the Center for Constitutional Rights, a legal and advocacy organization working with social movements and communities under threat around the world to dismantle racism, cisheteropatriarchy, economic oppression and abusive state practices. Central to Nadia’s lifework is a commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and she is the proud co-founder of the Adalah Justice Project, which builds solidarity across communities and movements. She works closely with the legal and advocacy team at CCR challenging U.S. complicity in Israel’s colonization, belligerent occupation and genocide of the Palestinian people, and continues to de-exceptionalize the Palestinian freedom movement and grow the power of our collective struggle.

Lucy El-Sherif is an Egyptian Muslim immigrant, mother and scholar. Her book project, Dabke on Turtle Island, unpacks the dances of settler citizenship—literally and figuratively—to understand what it means to dance a relationship to one stolen land, Palestine, from another stolen land, Haudenosaunne territory on Turtle Island. She is an assistant professor at McMaster University.

Cynthia Franklin is professor of English at the University of Hawai‘i, Acting Director of the Center for Biographical Research, and coeditor of Biography. She is the author of Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea (2023), Academic Lives: Memoir, Cultural Theory, and the University Today (2008), and Writing Women's Communities: The Politics and Poetics of Multi-Genre Women's Anthologies (1997). Her essays appear in venues including American Quarterly, Biography, Cultural Critique, Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, Life Writing, and The Contemporary Pacific. Her co-edited collections include a special issue of Biography on “Life in Occupied Palestine.” Her involvement in the ASA dates back 25 years, and includes being a member of the 2016 and 2025 program committees and the 2019 site committee; participating in the Academic and Community Activism Caucus, where she worked on the academic boycott resolution and, most recently, the Zionism resolution; and, for the Hawai‘i ASA (HASA) chapter, co-organizing two symposia on “The Place of Hawai‘i in American Studies,” and a visit by Remi Kanazi. She has also served as an AQ Board member, and is a member of the Editorial Collective for EtCH. Cynthia is cofounder of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai‘i (SFJP@UH).

Uahikea Maile is a Kanaka Maoli scholar, organizer, and practitioner from Maunawili, Oʻahu. He is assistant professor in the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Maile’s research interests include: history, law, and activism on Hawaiian sovereignty; Indigenous critical theory; settler colonialism; political economy; feminist and queer theories; and decolonization. Their work is published in American Quarterly, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Native American and Indigenous Studies Journal, Hūlili: Multidisciplinary Research on Hawaiian Well-Being, and Cultural Studies <-> Critical Methodologies. His work also appears in Biopolitics, Geopolitics, Life: Settler States and Indigenous Presences (Duke University Press, 2023), Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawaiʻi (Duke University Press, 2019), and Standing With Standing Rock: Voices From the #NoDAPL Movement (University of Minnesota Press, 2019). Maile’s current book manuscript, Nā Makana Ea: Settler Colonial Capitalism and the Gifts of Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi, examines the historical development and contemporary formation of settler colonial capitalism in Hawai‘i and gifts of sovereignty that seek to overturn it by issuing responsibilities for balancing relationships with ‘āina, the land and that who feeds. Their statements appear in The Guardian, CBC, CNN, NBC, Democracy Now!, Toronto Star, The Breach, Canada’s National Observer, and Yahoo! News. Before Chicago, Maile was assistant professor of Indigenous Politics in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto, St. George. While there, he was the founding director of Ziibiing Lab and received the Terry Buckland Award for Diversity and Inclusion in Education (2024), Milner Memorial Award (2023), and Early Career Teaching Award (2023). Maile earned their Ph.D. in American Studies in 2019 from the University of New Mexico, and continues serving as vice president of Red Media.

Jamaica Heolimeleikalani Osorio is a Kanaka Maoli wahine artist / activist / scholar / educator / storyteller born and raised in Pālolo Valley, Hawaiʻi. She is an Associate Professor of Indigenous and Native Hawaiian Politics at the University of Hawaiʻi, an internationally recognized poet, subject of an award-winning film, This is the Way we Rise, Co-writer of the VR film On the Morning You Wake (To the end of the world), and author of the award winning book Remembering our Intimacies: Moʻolelo, Aloha ʻĀina, and Ea. She believes in the power of aloha ʻāina and collective action to pursue liberatory, decolonial, and abolitionist futures of abundance.

Nina Shoman-Dajani is a Palestinian higher education practitioner who currently serves as the Assistant Dean of Learning Enrichment and College Readiness at Moraine Valley Community College which is situated in the southwest suburbs of Chicago/Little Palestine neighborhood. In addition, Dr. Shoman-Dajani teaches Middle Eastern Studies at Saint Xavier University and has served as a visiting lecturer at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC). For the last decade, her research has focused on the racial identity construction of Arab college students. She is a contributor to the recently published book Teaching Palestine: Lessons, Stories, Voices (Rethinking Schools, 2025) and one of the authors of an extensive study of the Arab community of Chicago titled: Beyond Erasure and Profiling: Cultivating Strong and Vibrant Arab American Communities in Chicagoland (2023) published by the Institute for Research on Race & Public Policy at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is a co-chair for the MENA/SWANA Caucus and the Transnational/International Committee of the National Advisory Council for the National Conference on Race and Ethnicity in Higher Education (NCORE), a former board member for the Arab American Studies Association and a board member for the Syrian Community Network, a refugee resettlement agency in Chicago. She currently serves as the Executive Director for the Chicago Palestine Film Festival—the longest running Palestine film festival in the world.