Reviving anti-imperialist nodes of solidarity on a global scale

Reviving anti-imperialist nodes of solidarity on a global scale

Walaa Alqaisiya, Marie Curie Global Fellow, Università Ca’ Foscari & Columbia University and Matteo Capasso, Marie Curie Global Fellow, Università Ca’ Foscari & Columbia University

Abstract: In the last two decades, racial capitalism and settler colonialism have consolidated as major conceptual tools to rethink the struggles of racialised groups in the North/South of the world. Respectively, they emphasize the primacy of race and indigeneity as lenses required to frame political oppression on a worldwide scale, and responses to it from within the political and epistemic needs—i.e., abolitionism and decoloniality—of these positionalities. However, they often do so by ignoring the contributions of anti-imperialism and Third World Marxism in advancing these causes. This piece reassembles the intellectual and political solidarities established across the Lakota nation (US), Libya and Palestine, through archival (from the late 1960s-80s) and field (2022-23) research. Drawing on a south-led theory and political praxis, we recentre anti-imperialism to the struggle of the Global South and racial “minorities” in the US imperial core with a twofold aim. First, gauge the value of the historical and material proximity of racialised/indigenous working class to their Southern compatriots; and second, challenge the collapse of radical theories within the political and intellectual boundaries of the liberal democracy project in the US imperial core.

Short bios: Walaa Alqaisiya (she/her) is a Marie Curie Global Fellow working across: Ca' Foscari University of Venice (Italy), Columbia University in the City of New York (USA) and the London School of Economics and Political Science (UK). She received her PhD in Human Geography from Durham University (UK), and worked as a Teaching Fellow in Gender, Sexuality and Conflict at the Department of Gender Studies, London School of Economics. Her forthcoming book Decolonial Queering in Palestine examines queer politics and aesthetics from a Palestinian native positionality. Walaa’s Marie Curie Fellowship extends her work on settler colonialism, decoloniality and gender whilst bringing an ecological and environmental dimension to these fields. It draws on multiple locales of indigeneity (i.e., Turtle Island, Palestine) to examine comparable historical and political processes of colonial ecocidal violence and the value of Indigene’s decolonial ecologies.  

Matteo Capasso (he/his) is a Marie Curie Global Fellow between Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy, and Columbia University in the City of New York, US. He was previously a Max Weber Research Fellow at the European University Institute and Visiting Fellow at the University of Turin. He is the author of the upcoming monograph, Everyday Politics in the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya (Syracuse University Press) that reconstructs the last two decades of the Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, leading up to the 2011 events that sanctioned its fall. Since 2013, he has been working for Middle East Critique, currently as Managing Editor. His current project focuses on the study of US-led imperialism through the Libyan microcosm. His research interests include political history, everyday politics, and international political economy, with a focus on the modern Middle East and North Africa and the Global South at large.