Indigenous Affinities: Comparative Study in Mayan and Palestinian Narratives
Eqeiq’s book project investigates similarities between contemporary Mayan and Palestinian narratives of indigeneity based on their shared histories of land struggle, practices of autonomy, quests for liberation, and collective resistance to systematic structural racism, military oppression, and colonial violence. Indigenous Affinities explores a multivalent dialogue between Mexico and Palestine, by going beyond the long history of Latin American solidarity with Palestine and engaging Palestine with Chiapas as parallel geographies of indigenous struggle. Her theoretical frameworks examine critical modalities pertinent to comparative reading in indigenous literature from the Global South, namely affinity, borderlands, and indigenous performance as a multiform practice of decoloniality. These modalities look at a range of contemporary literary texts in Mayan literature in Chiapas, Mexico, alongside Palestinian literature in Israel, while simultaneously dismantling the colonial borders that shaped their cartographies of minoritization and challenging the colonial construction of the very category of the “literary.” Therefore, Eqeiq examines oral texts, mostly community performances in memorial sites in rural areas, and rap music as prominent examples of indigenous oral literature that must be considered primary texts. Through this South‐South and periphery-periphery dialogue, Eqeiq goes beyond solidarity to engage closely with indigenous literary and cultural traditions deemed minor despite their global vision for citizenship, liberation, and decolonization.