Transnational Subalternity and Black- Palestinian Poetics of Solidarity

Following a recent surge in state violence experienced by African-Americans and Palestinians, both groups have repeatedly expressed their solidarity with each other, informed by the analogy of their subjugation and by the connectivity of the hegemonic systems that produce their respective subalternity. Transcending national categories, Black and Palestinian activists are currently engaging in creative expressions of solidarity and resistance from US-American to Palestinian and Israeli localities. African-Americans and Palestinians often appear to be 'othered' targets of racist politics that deem their marginalized communities as faceless, situating them at the antipode of the white, Western self. As inadequately visible subalterns in (post)colonial public spheres, their plight often remains insufficiently acknowledged. Manifestations of solidarity within a broader de-colonial aesthetics bear the potential to both reveal human rights violations and to formulate a transnational resistance. The aim of this research is to examine current and historic statements of solidarity and to analyze the creation of a transnational imagined community as a result of mutual Black-Palestinian re-mappings of colonial racism. The use of a transmedia activism - as manifested in social media, open letters, flashmobs, and performances - as a mean of mutual recognition and counter-narration directly attacks the ethnocentric empire, when activists reveal myths and ideologies by taking their personal state-sponsored struggle out of its national and ethnic context in order to compare it to other spaces of subjugation