Kin Not Akin

Cynthia G. Franklin’s Narrating Humanity straddles literary criticism, movement building, and dissidence within the corporate-settler university. In my comments, I dwell on the subtitle of the book, Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea, because I have witnessed the labor and joyous sizzle generating this span or, as Franklin puts it, learning “how seemingly different movements can strengthen and energize one another and how stories connect humans and movements that exist oceans and lands apart—and enable the creation of decolonial futures [note plural]” (222).1 Franklin and I work at the University of Hawaiʻi. For a decade, Franklin has forged deep collaborations to foster an intellectual-political space across the university and our local communities against considerable resistance to such efforts. Franklin reflects on these collaborations to think carefully about the connections between Palestinian liberation in the face of Israeli occupation and ongoing assertions of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) sovereignty in U.S.-occupied Hawaiʻi, bringing two decolonial and decolonizing movements into critical conversation.

The book, as a whole, tells us why and how stories emerging from social movements for climate justice, Black lives, the liberation of Palestine, and Native Hawaiian sovereignty are consequential. The dehumanization and monumental levels of suffering in the cascade of contemporary crises are often obvious to us because they stare us in the face. Perhaps we have become a lot better at apprehending the many modes of dehumanization.

We struggle, however, with acts of humanization without taking recourse to the available liberal tropes of the human that are contingent on a series of disavowals, as Franklin powerfully argues in the first part of the book. Relatedly, I think the rampant distortions in the United States of Palestinian struggles against Israeli military occupation and settlement leave U.S.-based activists reaching for analogies, a weak form of comparative analysis, to figure out why Palestine and Palestinians matter.

In formulating human being as a process and a verb, Franklin tracks the many narrative strategies that experiment with transformative ways of humanizing to mobilize intersectional, abolitionist, queer, Indigenous, and decolonial relations of care and responsibility. I offer my thoughts on the last two chapters to think through the analytics Franklin develops in the context of the theme of this Critical Ethnic Studies special issue, “Palestine After Analogy.” They unfold decolonial (nonstatist) solidarity work at the University of Hawaiʻi to respond to Palestinian civil society calls for boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) to protest Israel’s daily violation of Palestinian human rights. They paint a vibrant picture of the exchanges between Palestinian and Kanaka Maoli scholars, students, youth, organizers, artists, and poets as part of a series of community–university events and mobilizations every year since 2014.

During these ten months of Israel’s U.S.-funded genocidal war against Palestine, U.S. organizers combating Zionism and the decimation of Gaza and its people have had to clarify the grounds for their solidarity actions. The current wave of the Palestine solidarity movement has gathered force around exposing U.S. state and corporate complicity in the genocide, apartheid, and occupation across Palestine through material support to Israel in the form of weapons, investments, and the settlement of Palestinian lands. This political stance has injected new energy into calls for divestment and boycott of all Zionist institutions. In Hawaiʻi, the ongoing solidarity work has strengthened the commitment to deoccupation and demilitarization of the islands and Palestine.

Importantly, Franklin equips us with a methodology for building solidarity that does not require analogies (this struggle is like that) to activate Palestinian freedom and Hawaiian sovereignty. Franklin compellingly shows that these movements are not akin. Instead, they nurture and proliferate kinship. Movement politics and narratives make kin across many axes of difference, including other-than-humans. These two chapters, with their beautiful readings of texts crafted as part of these movements, render everyday acts of kin-making as necessary for liberatory movements.

To discern the transformative, radical potential of movement-based life writing, Franklin offers three concepts: narrative humanity, narrated humanity, and grounded narrative humanity. She deploys them to underline that “human making is unfinished and in process” (29). I want to underscore that these concepts concurrently develop our capacity to think of associations among forms of state-corporate violence and of affinities rather than similarities among movements to dismantle the complex institutions that wreak violence. I advance affinities in place of similarities so as not to collapse the material and ideological distinctions and heterogeneities at different sites of struggle.

Analogical thinking, as feminist and American studies scholars Grace Kyungwon Hong and Roderick A. Ferguson argue in their introduction to Strange Affinities, became a hallmark of comparative ethnic studies as it developed in the United States out of antiracist minority nationalisms in the 1960s and 1970s and in solidarity with Third World struggles.2 Intervening in these normative ways of alliance-building, they argue for an alternative, a comparative analytic of difference, drawing directly from women-of-color feminism and queer-of-color critiques. Just as dominant modes of narrated humanity encode devaluation and dehumanization to valorize certain types of subject-making, so dominant modes of comparison erase complex lines of difference and the lethal violence difference attracts. Extraordinarily well versed in women-of-color theorizations through life writing, Franklin furthers this analytic of difference by telling us how decolonial solidarities are enacted in Hawaiʻi and Turtle Island, where the occupying U.S. state, media, and public opinion try to obliterate Palestine and its right to freedom materially and discursively.

Contrast this to my exposure to Palestine liberation growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in India. As Vijay Prashad observes, across the board, all Indian political parties agreed on Palestine’s independence from 1936 well into the 1980s.3 This consensus filtered down to the reading and radio-listening public through government-owned and corporate media. I briefly recount India’s relationship with Palestine and Israel not out of nationalism but to show how my political consciousness about Palestine evolved.

Palestine’s liberation was never framed as a question. I understood that Palestine was forcibly partitioned and occupied in a series of wars waged by Israel, which continues to settle Palestinian land. While India recognized the state of Israel in 1948, I was aware that India had no diplomatic relations with Israel. That changed in 1992, coming on the heels of India’s liberalization, at which time elite state actors started to shift from nonalignment to alignment with the United States. Israel has become a defense supplier to augment India’s military-industrial complex, and India’s support for Palestine has weakened, though the Indian government continues to have an office in Ramallah. In 1974, India recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the legitimate representative of Palestine. In 1975, India signed on to a U.N. resolution that named Zionism as racism. The resolution was annulled in 1992, but by this time, the distinction between antisemitism and anti-Zionism was cemented in my consciousness. In 1988, India was the first non-Arab state to recognize the state of Palestine. Having grown up amid the Bangladesh Liberation War next door, the Vietnam War, and the democratization movement in South Korea, I had no illusions about the imperialist nature of the United States, and this informed my position on Palestine. I did not need analogies.

In the U.S. academy, as in public life in the United States, support for Palestine and Palestinians is criminalized, as Franklin’s chapter on Steven Salaita shows. Crucially, the chapter provides institutional context for the willingness of current U.S. university administrators to call the police on and punish students and faculty who speak of, teach about, and organize for Palestine. To critique Israel’s policies in Palestine and to engage in solidarity acts are (mis)characterized as hate, intentionally conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Salaita’s life writing counters the punishing and dehumanizing consequences of the dominant U.S. discourses and, like other Palestinian memoirs, creates narratives on Palestinian terms. As a voice for Palestine’s freedom, a scholar, educator, father, and school bus driver, Salaita, in Franklin’s reading, anticipates new ways of being human, which invite seeking kin to imagine deterritorialized solidarity or inter/nationalism.

In the United States, when Palestine starts to graze the consciousness of those who know little about the struggle, analogies understandably become a heuristic device to grasp why one should care about the cause. With the increasing inroads of the BDS movement on college campuses and the traction of the U.S. Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel to highlight the demands to end occupation, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid, Zionist attacks on faculty and students who support Palestine have escalated, feeding the McCarthy-era-like repression on campuses today.

To reveal how political consciousness about Palestinian liberation gets seeded and blossoms into political acts of solidarity beyond simple analogies, Franklin analyzes the many public events, lectures, panels with Kanaka Maoli commentators, workshops, and performances hosted by Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai‘i on the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa campus, usually at the Kamakakūokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies hālau (see chapters 4 and 5). These events, held despite objections, span several days, allowing our Palestinian guests to also learn about the struggles for Hawaiian independence on work days at farms, fishponds, taro patches, and Detours. These on-the-ground engagements reveal the look and feel of U.S. occupation on Oʻahu and the many intimations of unceasing waves of ea, which means life, breath, and sovereignty in Ōlelo Hawaiʻi. Franklin lovingly details the 2019 trip she took with Rana Barakat and Yousef Aljamal as part of Decolonial November to the Puʻuhonua at Puʻuhuluhulu to participate in the massive uprising to protect Mauna Kea from the proposed Thirty Meter Telescope, the construction of which was fully backed by the University of Hawai‘i administration.

But movement-making does not only happen in these large, public-facing venues, as Franklin so movingly narrates and theorizes. Franklin recreates for us those quiet moments where Hawaiʻi’s organizers, artists, and scholars share food and stories and spend time at the beach, where Salaita silently soaked in the presence of Rocky, the Hawaiian monk seal, and her pup Kaimana on the edges of Waikīkī (180–83, 215–25, 235). The fluency in each other’s histories and struggles, as Jacqui Alexander terms it, develops in these moments.4 They become occasions to practice responsibility, care, friendship, kindness, empathy, safety, and harmony—themes that Franklin elaborates on as she tells us about how such narratives bring humans into being and connect humans to movements to protect people, land, water, and other-than-humans. These are the material, grounded enactments of kinship.

These quiet spaces allow us to practice on a small and intimate scale what a queer, abolitionist, decolonial world would look like. Palestine–Hawaiʻi solidarities beyond analogy manifest themselves when Kanaka Maoli activists arrive with signs at demonstrations against Israeli aggression in the West Bank, demanding that Israel end the occupation of Palestine and chant, “Intifada! Intifada!”; when ʻIhilani Lasconia and D. Kauwila Mahi lead us in their rousing call-and-response, “Free your people / Free your mind / Deoccupy Hawaiʻi and Palestine.” They connect unlikely sites to map new geographies of struggle from Mākua (a military reserve on Oʻahu used for military exercises) to Sheikh Jarrah and from Waimānalo to Gaza, where bulldozers dispossess Kānaka ʻŌiwi and Palestinians (232–34). As we bear witness to Israel’s genocide and Palestinian resistance to it, the rap has become an anthem, anchoring the mutuality of the struggles against deoccupation.

Franklin charts how struggles constellate through unruly stories shared to dream liberation. This book’s contribution to the urgent struggles for justice in our times lies in these stories of organizing and finding kin.