Indigenous Affinities

Reveals how Mayan and Palestinian narratives connect through shared Indigenous struggles, proposing ‘affinity’ as a framework for global solidarity

Inspired by and committed to global Indigenous solidarity and South-South encounters, Indigenous Affinities examines the multifaceted connection between Chiapas and Palestine. In tracing unseen threads that connect parallel geographies of struggle found in contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives, Indigenous Affinities proposes affinity as a new conceptual framework. Eqeiq shows how – despite emerging from distinct historical processes of minoritization, subalternization, and racialization – Mayan and Palestinian written, visual, and performance texts articulate a common configuration of Indigeneity. These seemingly unrelated connections, Eqeiq contends, can be read through shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to racial capitalism, military oppression, and colonial violence.

Eqeiq examines murals that offer a visual testimony to common struggles and transnational connection, explores fragmented bilingualisms that have propelled language revival and revitalization, highlights a shared concern with borders, and documents the performative commemorations of massacres. Reading such sites together in the complexities and specificities of disparate contexts, Indigenous Affinities illuminates how the lens of affinity can elucidate solidarity and resistance within the Global South.

Author Biography

Amal Eqeiq is Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at Williams College.