We began curating the collection of articles for this issue before Israel unleashed its most recent obliterating war on Gaza and the Palestinians—and before the waves of solidarity with the Palestinian people, from protests and direct actions to the encampments on campuses, spread across the surface of the earth. If solidarity has always been a pressing political and ethical question that has called for critical interrogations of its formations, today, as we prepare to submit this issue to the press in May 2024, Palestine solidarity is crystallizing into a radical challenge that states, administrators, and elites are countering by censoring, repressing, and criminalizing its actors and nodes. Hence, the Palestine solidarity encampments on campuses have primarily been met not with a willingness to be transformed by their rage and demands but with riot police, vigilante violence, and other repressive measures. Every day, we hear about university administrators sanctioning, suspending, and evicting students, even as, one day, the same universities will claim to be the alma maters of the outlawed students.
One pervasive critical reading of this moment of solidarity highlights political repression and violations of rights, freedoms, and democratic principles. Under such a reading, the key targets of attack are the rights of students and protestors, alongside the universities as beacons (or at least the last remaining nodes) of critical thought. Palestine and Palestinians are at the periphery of this reading. Another related, albeit less prevalent, reading considers the specific object of attack and repression: Palestine solidarity and, by extension, solidarity itself. Such a reading begs the following questions: Why is solidarity, especially of the nonstatist variety, so troubling to hegemonic powers, such that so much is mobilized against it? Does the attack on Palestine solidarity tell not only of the “Palestine exception” to free speech and democratic values in the West but also of the challenge of solidarity itself? Put differently, could it be that because institutionalized liberal values do not accommodate the liberation of Palestine, the solidarity that this struggle propels and condenses must always exceed and challenge them? If so, might it be that Palestine solidarity illuminates and radicalizes a challenge intrinsic to solidarity itself? And what are the terms of this challenge?
From neoliberal austerity politics to antirefugee and antimigrant crackdowns, from the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic to the racist logics of police violence and incarceration, crisis after crisis has revealed the exclusions and the selectivity of particular forms of solidarity. Such restrictive, hegemonic, and statist frameworks—and the social-theoretical accounts that refine and rationalize them—present solidarity as an operation that coheres subjects, holds them together in one community, and coordinates their aspirations, sympathies, or interests in perfect unity to ensure the reproduction of the social whole. Solidarity, in other words, is seen as the transcending of differences to generate unity. Indeed, when pressed into dominant discourses of social integration and cohesion, solidarity converts difference into sameness. And when such differences persist or reappear in new forms, prominently due to migration or displacement, then solidarity is said to be in danger or to have failed. On this understanding, solidarity embraces its exclusionary character. Under these hegemonic and statist forms of solidarity, desolidarization—abandonment by the state and society, dehumanization, and indifference to genocide—in fact becomes the signature of our times.
Yet, as a complex and historically deep counterhegemonic tradition attests, this is neither the only archive nor the only horizon of solidarity. On university campuses, in political movements and social struggles locally and across borders, solidarity is invoked, reclaimed, and practiced as a counterhegemonic and radically transformative force. It challenges exclusionary ideologies and selective institutionalizations of solidarity that restrict it to ethno-nationalist or communitarian frameworks. Numerous historical and contemporary practices of solidarity offer alternative grammars and horizons: from anticolonial, Indigenous, and Black solidarization to contemporary migrant and Palestine solidarity, we are in the presence not of discrete movements but of an incomplete, ongoing challenge, the challenge of attaching and connecting subjects, collectivities, predicaments, and struggles. Such attachments and connections trouble projects of inclusion in existing social relations and political institutions, where these are left uninterrogated. Instead, these attachments and connections articulate, in the sense of joining and intertwining, nodes, movements, and communities alongside, not at the expense of, exploited, expropriated, dominated, dispossessed, and exterminated populations elsewhere and at home.
This counterhegemonic tradition of solidarity charts alternative paths for political life on earth. These paths are irreducible to the territorial divisions and borders that sanction abandonment and facilitate indifference. Instead, these paths thread together and intertwine lives. One cause emerges as condensing another, echoing and reciting it. Reverberations, resonances, and contiguities proliferate. Rather than mapping the earth along lines of division and delimiting its discrete parts, solidarization discloses the earth as the site of abundant pathways, movements, channels, and tunnels, emerging and receding above and below the ground. If the sea has become a militarized border and the sky a network of surveillance technologies and mass destruction, the horizon—of solidarity—is more likely found in the modest tunnels, makeshift barricades, broken ramparts, nomadic ships, steadfast olive trees, and the many practices that refuse the political order of the earth and insist on opening up the earth against its capture in the given international order.
If such is the horizon, abundant in the smallness of its parts, perhaps we could listen to Franz Fanon's wretched of the earth as they recite a poem by Mahmoud Darwish: “The earth is closing on us, pushing us through the last passage.” And then they will say, “We will die here, here in the last passage. Here and here our blood will plant its olive tree.”1 The deadly border, the frontier, the delimited and territorialized earth is not the only “here” on the earth. There is struggle, destruction, and blood, but there is also an olive tree. Because it is centuries old, it defies modern colonialism. Its ancientness exceeds the present. And yet it is planted in the present, from the blood of the present. It is as though the struggle against the closures of the earth—or solidarity in the sense of attachments and interconnections, as one itinerary of such a struggle—activates something already of the earth, an opening that has been closed off by the international political order that has “pushed us to the last passage.”
Against this backdrop, this issue of Critical Times probes the question of solidarity—its subjects, horizons, difficulties, and limits. The contributions bring together a variety of disciplinary and intellectual perspectives, referring to heterogeneous traditions and archives in a multiplicity of sites, articulating and addressing further questions that trouble dominant accounts and seek to open theoretical and political horizons beyond the confined imaginaries of the present: What accounts of politics and ethics do counterhegemonic practices of solidarity offer? How have they transformed historically, and what geographic imaginaries have these transformations triggered? What images and horizons, other than unity and cohesion, are summoned by vocabularies of solidarity from other languages of struggle? How can we consider solidarity alongside adjacent formations, including friendship, kinship, or comradeship? Might the thinking of solidarity as a challenge—as distinct from the challenge of solidarity itself—illuminate an unsynchronized world, at once broken and in the process of being mended? And if solidarity requires the presence of subjects and associations, is it possible to solidarize with the wretched of the earth or with survivors of catastrophes other than by rescuing and aiding them, speaking on their behalf, or supplementing and completing them? Might the wretched of the earth compel solidarity as a relation of force that transforms the solidarizing actor? Who solidarizes, and who remains incapable of such solidarization? Indeed, what are the contours of solidarity today? How can the limits of solidarity and even its impossibilities be thought without reifying them? And what other political and ethical work beyond solidarity follows?
This issue opens with contributions providing glimpses of the vast historical and geographical terrain that opens up once we decenter dominant notions of solidarity. In her discussion of South Korean artistic responses to the military coup in Myanmar, Hieyoon Kim explores the possibilities and limits of protest art as a medium for transnational solidarity. While her case studies highlight the difficulties of breaking out of the binaries and hierarchies structuring hegemonic practices and imaginaries of solidarity, she also indicates the potential of protest art to forge new social imaginaries. Harun Rasiah turns our attention to the militant and ethical praxis of Safiya Asya Bukhari, a key actor in the Black liberation movement in the United States since the 1970s. Rasiah considers the implications of Safiya's “pedagogy of remembrance,” calling attention to Islam's importance for solidarity-informed Black struggle. And in tracing significant episodes in the political history of psychoanalysis in Brazil, Ana Minozzo and Raluca Soreanu present free clinics as an attempt to develop a solidaristic “mental health commons,” highlighting the affective and the psychosocial dimensions of emancipatory solidarity.
While many solidarity movements aim to prefigure the social relations they seek to bring into existence, as Patricia Cipollitti Rodríguez argues in her contribution, such aspirations are also confronted with asymmetric power relations that can distort and undermine transformative projects. Drawing on hermeneutics and theories of creolization, she argues that processes of collaboration under conditions of domination require forms of critical understanding that are themselves transformative of the subjects involved. Similarly emphasizing the transversal and transformative dynamics of solidarity struggles against accounts grounding solidarity in preexisting shared feelings or experiences, in her essay Marianna Poyares turns to border solidarity and the case of the New Sanctuary Movement in the United States. From this movement, in conversation with materialist feminist approaches, she develops an understanding of solidarity as grounded in the interdependence of heterogeneous alliances that forge new counterhegemonic territories (and constituencies) of struggle. While migrant struggles provide politically productive sites for the problematization of existing and the enactment of transformative forms of solidarity, as Angela Smith details in her contribution, their terrain shifts and poses specific obstacles to transversal forms of solidarity. As a new site of solidarity and struggle emerges in the skies, the materiality of flying and the legal norms that govern it constrain and shape the scope and dynamic of solidarity in ways that significantly differ from its more terrestrial instantiations.
These articles pursue solidarity from the surface of the earth to the sky-turned-airspace. But, as Nikolas Kosmatopoulos reminds us, there is also the sea. Kosmatopoulos's “Emergences” essay turns to contemporary Palestine solidarity ships in the Mediterranean that challenge Israel's embargo on Gaza to consider what the sea affords solidarity. He argues that crisscrossing the seas engenders a contagious insurgency that should not be subsumed within humanitarian frameworks but must be understood as a confrontation with the settler-colonial siege, forced immobility, the border, and the commercial ships enabling genocide.
Closing this issue are two artistic interventions on Palestine solidarity, historical and contemporary. Rasha Salti and Kristine Khouri's intervention is an adaptation and expansion from one of the “nodes” of their Past Disquiet exhibition, which reanimates histories of militant, artistic, and museological practices that aimed to connect, through museums of solidarity without walls, tricontinental, anti-imperialist solidarity movements from the 1960s to the 1980s. Here, Salti and Khouri highlight a 1976 public action by art and worker collectives based in France and Italy to end the siege on Palestinians in the Tal al-Zaatar refugee camp in Lebanon. The challenge of solidarity outside the market and the gallery is at the center of this intervention.
The second artistic intervention is a photo essay by two University of California, Berkeley, students encamped at the UC Berkeley Free Palestine Solidarity Encampment. Together, the photographs by Olive Elibott and the text by Banan Abdelrahman offer a glimpse of their practices of solidarity. If the tent was the object that the Zionist movement engendered in 1948 to house the refugees it expelled from Palestine, it would soon become a reminder of dispossession and the site of struggle against it. The refugee tent would become a threat, a challenge to be countered. By reappearing in Gaza, and even in other places across Palestine, the tent and its challenge have been reanimated. Reappearing across the surface of the earth, the solidarity tent reverberates the challenge.
