Inter/Nationalism

Inter/Nationalism examines mutual forms of decolonization in North America and Palestine. Salaita analyzes the many ways that the issue of Palestine has become important to the fields of American Indian and Indigenous Studies while arguing that American Indian and Indigenous Studies should be more central to scholarship and activism focused on Palestine. The book emphasizes the importance of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, or BDS, movement against Israel to the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and Palestinians into conversation. Offering an inside account of how BDS operates, the book illustrates its terrific potential as an organizing community. Salaita also critiques a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of US president Andrew Jackson, who oversaw the Trail of Tears, and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev (Vladimir) Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the United States and Israel. The book is written for both academics and activists, with the goal of eroding the traditional boundaries between the two communities.