Decolonial Futures Lab

Mirān / مران

We are a Palestinian-led collective of scholars, artists, and movement builders who travel to what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls the “historical geography of the future” to study, imagine, and design decolonial worlds with Indigenous and racialized communities—the people who create and inhabit this geography as just and alternative forms of land-based, global, and planetary life.1 Mirān is an Arabic verb meaning “to rehearse or perform,” anchoring the concept of a Palestinian decolonial praxis. Through this Palestinian lens and method, we highlight the design and rehearsal of alternative worlds as relational practices of international solidarity and collective assembly. Our Decolonial Futures Lab treats the design of objects and experiences as a generative space for sensuous and affective encounters and affiliations that cultivate Land Back futures and contribute to the global archive of what Palestine and other sites of struggle against settler colonialism and racial capitalism can look like today and after liberation.

Hawai‘i 2025

Our inaugural design lab will take place in 2025 in Hawaiʻi, the occupied land of the Kānaka Maoli (Native Hawaiians). Our itinerary begins there to honor the birthplace of this project and celebrate a decade of mutual commitment to Palestinian–Hawaiian internationalism that informs our practice. We as Palestinian scholars and organizers met in November 2023 as part of Decolonial November, an annual event organized by University of Hawai‘i Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine that brings Palestinian scholars, artists, and movement builders to learn and engage with each other’s histories and struggles as Indigenous Peoples, strengthening relationships and solidarities. Growing out of these decolonial encounters, throughout the past decade, Palestinians, Native Hawaiians, and allies have developed sustained colearning experiences of how to practice global Indigeneity at the intersection of race, class, gender, and land defense. Our Decolonial Futures Lab understands modern Hawai‘i, like its colonial parent the United States, as a settler society—that is, a space in which the Indigenous Peoples have been subject to eliminatory policies for the benefit of settlers who now dominate the islands. But while the settler colonial elimination of Indigenous Peoples and social relations in Hawai‘i and Palestine are ongoing projects, so is Indigenous resistance, or what J. Kēhaulani Kauanui calls “enduring Indigeneity.”2 Kānaka Maoli have been organizing for the return of traditional lands and waters, an end to militarization, reparations, and sovereignty since the American invasion and overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1873. Our interdisciplinary analytical framework and methodological approach bring together the transit of U.S. empire, settler colonial logics, and military power at the same time that they work to undo them, connecting struggles against U.S. imperialism and anticolonial solidarities across Palestine and Hawai‘i. While evoking relationships between Zionism and white supremacy across settler states, our praxis understands the United States as a progenitor of Zionism in Palestine and settlement in Hawai‘i; hence, struggling against settler colonialism and militarization in Hawai‘i and designing decolonial futures alongside Native Hawaiian communities is intertwined with Palestinian liberation.

Our four-week intensive decolonial anthropology and futures design lab begins with the premise that land is back in the stewardship of Indigenous Peoples! We bring together collaborative ethnographic fieldwork with Indigenous communities and movement-building organizations, interdisciplinary critical theory, and creative practices from design, art, film, and futures studies. Thinking with ongoing practices and movement building for anticolonial liberation, as a collective we will assume the position of futures designers tasked with questioning, imagining, and creating ex-colonial worlds. Collectively, we will explore settler colonialism, militarization, racialization, ecosocial devastation, Indigeneity, sovereignty, liberatory healing, and more through the lens of Indigenous and decolonial politics. At the same time, we will work collectively with a local Kanaka Maoli organization on a collaboratively designed ethnographic project, engaging the praxis of activist anthropology to compose and tell stories about alternative decolonial futures through designed objects and multimedia productions. Working with artists, storytellers, and practitioners in the fields of futures and Indigenous studies at the University of Hawai‘i to open this speculative practice to the wider community, a goal of our course will be to transform stories into immersive experiential scenarios for public audiences to participate in rehearsing decolonial futures. While we anticipate numerous collective projects and relationships growing out of this encounter, one outcome will be an “Exhibition from the Future” that we collectively curate and showcase at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa Commons Gallery, part of a mobile archive that will continue to expand as our lab travels to new geographies.

Notes

1. 1. Ruth Wilson Gilmore et al., Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (Verso Books, 2022).

2. 2. J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, “‘A Structure, Not an Event’: Settler Colonialism and Enduring Indigeneity,” Lateral: Journal of the Cultural Studies Association 5, no. 1 (Spring 2016): https://csalateral.org/issue/5-1/forum-alt-humanities-settler-colonialism-enduring-indigeneity-kauanui/.