Decolonial Human-Being from Life Writing to Movement(s)

In Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea, Cynthia G. Franklin brings into conversation life writings connected to various struggles for justice—in particular, Black, Palestinian, and Indigenous liberation and self-determination movements—and argues that their authors confront, complicate, and transform the meaning of being human. Her study reckons with the ambivalent history of “humanity” as a disciplining concept and reveals that at the heart of the work of socially engaged life writers is a robust and collective effort to rehabilitate humanity as the guiding principle for a more just future for all humans.

As a scholar of mobility and decolonization in the Palestinian context, I am drawn to reflect on the ways that life writing and physical movement function as parallel and intersecting decolonial practices of being human. Both writing and movement attest to the resilience of marginalized groups and facilitate their connections within and beyond their communities. These exercises in human-being are particularly significant in contexts where said groups are dehumanized to justify conquest and extraction. Furthermore, life writing and physical movement complement each other; the physical movement of authors, readers, and publishers offers one way for life writing to reach new audiences, and where mobility is strictly controlled, written accounts can move beyond the borders of that immobilization.

The imbrication of life writing and mobility appears in several of Franklin’s chapters, but my reflections will focus on chapter 4, in which she discusses Palestinian life writing and specifically Steven Salaita’s memoir and blog. She contextualizes the importance of Palestinian life writing by identifying myriad ways Zionists attempt to silence, repress, and criminalize any expressions of or even belief in Palestinian humanity, cataloging campaigns against academics like Salaita alongside legislative intervention and legal tactics. In a parenthetical example, Franklin mentions the imprisonment of poet Dareen Tatour, whose targeting is one case among many Palestinians incarcerated by Israel for even the most mundane political expressions (consider, e.g., the approximately four hundred Palestinians arrested for “incitement” on social media in each of the last few years) (168). The multifaceted and international repression that Franklin describes is compounded by Israel’s im/mobilization program; shifting borders, physical impediments, segregated roads, and a complex permit regime are administered by capricious Israeli officials to force, forbid, and otherwise burden Palestinian movement. Palestinian life writing is vital in part because self-determined movement—and thus the ability to travel and share experiences with broad audiences—is categorically denied to Palestinians. Because free Palestinian expression and movement are routinely targeted, it can be easy to lose sight of the transformational power of decolonization practices, and yet Franklin’s study demonstrates that this work is nonetheless happening and has high-stakes consequences for the meaning of humanity itself.

In my own work, I argue that collective Palestinian movement should be understood as part of a repertoire of decolonization because it involves routine but meaningful practices of reinhabiting colonized land.1 I read Franklin’s argument, then, to suggest that one mechanism by which this mobility accomplishes decolonization is by instantiating alternative conceptions of humanity against and beyond colonial frameworks. The reinhabitation of colonized land, which is paramount to decolonization, is necessarily intertwined with a reclamation of the humanity whose denial has facilitated displacement. Additionally, we can see mobility alongside life writing as evidence that, despite the use of humanity as a term that justifies domination, people are still actively reclaiming and repurposing it. Given the hubris of intensifying global fascism, racism, and colonialism that constantly and prematurely declare victory over social justice movements, it is worth recognizing the real practices and impact of this (re)narrating of humanity.

To trace distinct approaches that authors take to narrating humanity, Franklin proposes three terms representing different postures relative to liberal notions of the human. Those who deploy “narrative humanity” tend to reproduce the basic tenets of liberal “man” while challenging the unjust domination it has been traditionally harnessed to achieve. Meanwhile, writers who present “narrated humanity” envision new ways of being human that fundamentally depart from liberal norms. Franklin also adds “grounded narrative humanity” to describe representations of human-being that, while clearly nonnormative in the liberal framework, are nonetheless normative to Indigenous communities.

I found these terms generative beyond the life writing they were meant to describe, generative for illuminating that which is being challenged and revitalized when oppressed communities practice freedom of movement. In the liberal tradition, human movement became intertwined with freedom under numerous disciplining conditions.2 It is only the movement of a limited set of subjects—dependent on the preferences of a given political regime—that can be identified with freedom, while the movement of all others is viewed as a threat to be controlled or prohibited. Using Franklin’s term, we might identify the narrative humanity account of mobility to include individual travel, bourgeois flânerie, and orderly, secure, and “civilized” movement. And if we use narrated humanity (and grounded narrative humanity) as a lens through which to view the mobility of marginalized people, we see the production and practice of decolonial forms of being human. In fact, these terms have the potential to describe a variety of activity that redefines humanity in relation to social justice movements, and I expect they will travel through critical ethnic studies doing just that.

Returning to chapter 4, Franklin directly addresses mobility as she thinks with some of Edward Said’s writings on exile and Salaita’s blog entries about becoming a bus driver after his unjust expulsion from academia. Franklin draws out both authors’ emphases on the salience of movement to Palestinian life and shows that “the constant motion that comes with exile and dispossession” is also a site where humanity is reconstituted through a blend of narrative and narrated humanity (177). To reclaim self-determined movement for Palestinians is to enact a redefined humanity that comprises mutual care, interpersonal connection, extended conceptions of family, personal and community security, international solidarity, and incivility in the face of injustice. She even connects these themes to her own observations on Palestinian public transit where drivers and riders engaged in similar practices of care, connection, and being human.

This line of inquiry calls into question the distinction between Franklin’s concepts of narrated humanity and grounded narrative humanity. Although she primarily identifies practices of narrated humanity, she is in fact describing phenomena that could also be understood as grounded narrative humanity. By comparing Salaita’s accounts of bus driving to the communal care practices of bus drivers with whom Franklin rode in Palestine, she shows that these mobile acts of humanity are normative for Palestinians in Palestine as in the diaspora. Evincing the normativity of this Palestinian relationality, her analysis resembles her formulation of grounded narrative humanity, which reflects ways of being human that diverge from the liberal tradition but are “normative within Indigenous worldviews” (23). I make this point only to offer an observation that even in writings that are characterized as narrated humanity, there is a manifestly committed relationship to communities who are already doing humanity in a way that is significantly different and thus threatening to liberal humanism and yet so ordinary that it might seem unremarkable. Collective movement—in its various forms, including migration and mundane transit—is a lens that reveals the interrelationship between narrated and grounded narrative humanity precisely because it is a fundamentally constitutive practice of being human, shared across differences though differently signified.

While I expected the prominence of communal care in Franklin’s analysis of Palestinian life writing, I was, perhaps wrongly, surprised by her emphasis on security as a central value for decolonial practices of human-being. My discomfort stemmed from the common deployment of security as a pretext for radical restrictions on the free movement of oppressed people and of Palestinians in particular. Yet Franklin’s radical approach to security parallels her position vis-à-vis humanity: She throws in with social movement organizers who refuse the impulse to relinquish these terms to the colonial projects that have weaponized them and who reinhabit and redefine those terms in their efforts to make a more just world.