Author’s Response

Over the course of the past fifteen months and counting, Israel’s genocidal bombardment of Gaza and its reign of terror from the river to the sea has been accompanied by its heightened campaign, ongoing for over seventy-five years, of portraying Palestinians as terrorists. Since October 7, 2023, by official counts that are vastly underreported due to the thousands buried under rubble, Israeli military operations have killed at least 46,707 Palestinians, including nearly 18,000 children, and injured at least 110,265; displaced over 1.9 million Gazans, with nearly 80 percent living in makeshift shelters; blasted Gaza with an estimated 85,000 metric tons of explosives, destroying homes, shelters, hospitals, mosques, churches, farms, universities, and schools; and cut off food, water, medical supplies, and electricity, leaving an entire people enduring, and in many cases dying from, denied health care, extreme dehydration and starvation.1 Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has justified this genocide by saying, “We are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly.”2 With this utterance, Gallant does not simply disregard the fact that every human shares kinship with nonhuman animals. He also declares it within the bounds of morality to bomb, burn, and poison animals with white phosphorus, to starve, terrorize, and torture them with murderous cruelty. Laying claim to the definition of who counts as human, he asserts the human as separate from, with dominion over, and with no responsibilities toward all he and his ilk designate as inhuman, or not quite human. With such an understanding, one that politicians and the mainstream media uphold in the name of defending the civil, who would ever want to lay claim to being human? And yet, what does it mean to relinquish this claim when to be excluded means to be denied life and the other most basic rights? And, in the face of what Steven Salaita calls the “uncivil rites” and the narratives that justify dehumanization, what does it mean to tell other stories of human being and belonging?3 How can such stories help to create a world in which we might, all of us, thrive? These are the questions that animate Narrating Humanity.

On the one hand, it can seem pointless to continue asking these questions while Israel, with the full support of the United States and other allied nations, perpetuates genocide. The Zionist entity does so impervious to the cries of those it kills and maims and indifferent to the millions of us, in Palestine and worldwide, demanding a ceasefire, the end to the seventeen-year blockade of besieged Gaza, and a stop to the world’s longest ongoing military occupation. On the other hand, these questions seem ever more urgent and ever more clearly answered through the rising up of Palestinians and the many others standing in solidarity with them. In tandem with related freedom struggles, a global intifada is taking place. Through their narratives and organizing, people are creating decolonial futures and new and resurgent ways of human becoming and belonging—to one another and to all the life-forms, including land and waters, that sustain us. It is this claim, this hope for human being, that is at the heart of Narrating Humanity.

Fred Moten puts his finger on this pulse as he amplifies and brilliantly riffs off the beat of the book. As often happens with the very best interlocutors, Moten, along with Lisa Cohen, Monisha Das Gupta, Maryam S. Griffin, and Jennifer Kelly, breathes life into arguments I did not quite know I was making. Moten sharply, and aptly, reformulates what I call “the human in crisis” as “the human as crisis,” meditating on the human as “a bloody battleground, a terrible obligation, and a set of hard-won chances.” Rather than wrestling with the human, Moten instead advocates for a kind of living that turns away from “the metaphysics of individuation” and that involves dancing—participating in the coresistance that we witness in the movement of Kānaka Maoli, or Native Hawaiians, who rise like a mighty wave to protect Mauna Kea, their sacred mountain and their relation, grounded in ways of being and belonging that transcend colonial practices of violence and domination that are sustained in the name of the human. In Narrating Humanity, I seek to express my gratitude to Kānaka Maoli kia‘i (protectors) for the privilege of contributing to this movement, and to this better practice of being human, from my position as a settler. In this response, I thank Moten, who through his words himself engages in a dance with Narrating Humanity, bringing out its more-than-human moves.

This gratitude extends to the others in this forum. With their attention to love and kinship, Lisa Cohen and Monisha Das Gupta cocreate the story Narrating Humanity seeks to tell. With her own accounts of the ways friendships can move us into not wholly known ways of thinking the human, ones that make possible survival as they enable collective forms of resistance to historical erasure, Cohen beautifully tells of how these relations breathe life into freedom struggles, “on the ground, in our shared air, on the page.” So, too, as Das Gupta engages with both Narrating Humanity and this special issue of Critical Ethnic Studies and its critical attention to analogy, her profound insight that the Palestinian and Hawaiian movements are not akin but rather that they “nurture and proliferate kinship” comes out of her own participation in these and related movements. In the way she draws on her own experiences growing up in India in the 1970s, I also appreciate Das Gupta’s reminder that forms of narrative humanity that uphold Zionism might be hegemonic in imperially networked nation-states that include the United States and Israel, but that outside as well as within these circuits of empire, among those who are kin, anti-Zionist forms of narrative humanity have long fostered the movement for a free Palestine.

Das Gupta’s discussion supports Griffin’s generative critique of grounded normativity. Through attention to “mobile acts of humanity” that her own scholarship shows to be normative decolonial practices for Palestinians, Griffin illuminates ways that life writing I am approaching as acts of “narrated humanity” include within them a “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.” In this way, as she attends to the chapter on Salaita, Griffin puts pressure on the book’s central theoretical categories. She opens important possibilities for thinking about the human from a perspective that is, to draw on Salaita’s term, more “inter/national” or attuned to ways different movements for liberation exist in and through their relations to one another.4

I also appreciate Griffin’s questioning of whether “security” can serve as a central value for decolonial practices of human-being—about whether appeals to security should be left to the colonial forces that have weaponized this term. I want to put this question in conversation with Jennifer Kelly’s thinking about what it means to live in public—her invitation to readers to refuse “to make oneself small and palatable in the face of settler genocidal logics” and to join the work of anti-Zionist organizing within the space of the university, despite the increasingly repressive force of administrators, right-wing Zionist organizations, and those who duplicitously identify as allies. This work surely requires challenging the equation of “security” with the institutionalized forms of censorship and repression—and with the militarized violence—deployed to expand, defend, and protect imperial interests and agendas. But, in our own practices, do we abdicate or take back the term security?

On October 19, 2023, Malak Mattar, the internationally renowned young artist from Gaza, gave a lecture titled “Art, Gaza, and Decolonization” at the University of Hawai‘i. During this lecture, she addressed ways that her family, twelve days into Israel’s genocidal attack, had been displaced six times and were currently in a neighborhood under bombardment. As she was signing her artwork, men who had been present at the lecture unfurled large Israeli flags. They hurled attacks at Mattar and those of us present and shouted, “No Jewish genocide!” (The previous week, they had stood across the street from students and faculty with Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai‘i yelling, “We will kill you.” A few weeks later, one of these men, still draped in the Israeli flag that seems to double for him as a uniform and a security blanket, told me, “I know who you are. We’ve been watching you. Your days are over.”) In response to the Zionist aggression following Mattar’s lecture, a line of women spontaneously formed, creating a barrier between the men and Mattar, who continued to sign her art. When the men tried to push forward, calling us terrorists, baby-killers, and antisemites, we began chanting, “Free Palestine.” We had the numbers, and we were louder than they were. Our words covered over the ugliness of theirs. I believe our quickness in forming this line had everything to do with the fact that among us were Kānaka Maoli who were part of the line of mana wāhine—women who stood in their power and groundedness in land or ‘āina—against a militarized police, protecting their kūpuna (revered elders) as well as Mauna Kea. As campus security officers entered, the men left. The uniformed authorities, with their power to expel bodies from the room, worked within a logics they understood. But I know that what made those of us gathered in that room feel safe and strong was us, as we joined together in an action that kia‘i Malia Osorio describes as a “lei aloha.”5 Griffin’s response presents an opportunity to think about what to call this manifestation of “security.” And here I have also been thinking about how security means “free from care”—an etymology that perhaps better aligns with the state’s absence of care and contrasts to communities who insist on care as a condition for freedom and safety.

To draw on Kelly’s formulation, the invitations present in the responses to Narrating Humanity all provide angles into Narrating Humanity. These invitations—Moten’s, to dance; Cohen’s, to insist on love as a scholarly and pedagogical practice; Das Gupta’s, to be kin not akin; Griffin’s, to honor decolonial forms of movement and formations; Kelly’s, to live in public—also extend its efforts to see movements in the making as ways to materialize forms of human being and belonging that refuse the settler state’s logics.

As I state at the beginning and end of Narrating Humanity, my hope in writing the book is to keep company with others who, through their engagements with movement politics, are finding narrative forms that bring into existence as-yet-undetermined ways of being human that will be breath-giving, rooted in land and life, joyful, and breathtakingly beautiful. For their participation in what can only be a collective project, and for the ways they generously and generatively help bring the dreams of this book to life, I thank these contributors.