In this seminar, Amal Eqeiq introduces her recently published book Indigenous Affinities: Toward Solidarity Across the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2025). Centering affinity as the book’s conceptual anchor, she explores its semantic, affective, and conceptual dimensions in Arabic and Tsotsil Maya, while foregrounding translation across languages, epistemologies, and Indigenous worlds as a vital site for theorizing relationality. She asks how affinity might function as a decolonial comparative method grounded in Indigenous relationality and sumud (resilience), and what forms of South-South solidarity, contemporary Mayan philosophy, and iconographies of resistance—stretching from the southern and northern borders of Mexico to Palestine—make such a framework possible. Rather than drawing simple parallels between Indigenous struggles across these geographies, she shows how affinity offers a decolonial lens for thinking connection through difference, shaped by uneven histories of conquest, settler colonialism, state violence, dispossession, resistance, and resurgence. In doing so, she highlights affinity as both method and affect, opening generative ways of understanding transnational Indigenous solidarities and shared struggles against ongoing colonial domination.
Amal Eqeiq is an Associate Professor of Arabic Studies and Comparative Literature at William College and Chair of Arabic Studies. She is the author of Indigenous Affinities: Toward Solidarity Across the Global South (Fordham University Press, 2025). Her interdisciplinary research includes modern Arab literature, popular culture, Palestine Studies, feminism(s), performance studies, translation, Indigenous Studies in the Americas, the Global South, literary history, hip-hop, critical border studies, and decoloniality. She has contributed to the Contemporary Levant Journal, The Routledge Companion to World Literature and World History, Journal of Palestine Studies, Transmotion: An Online Journal of Postmodern Indigenous Studies, MadaMasr, Jadaliyya, Kohl, La Jornada, and Après la fin: Cartes pour un autre avenir, among others. She has received several awards, including a writing residency at Hedgebrook, the Dean’s Medal in Humanities from the University of Washington, the Hellman Fellowship, and a PARC NEH/FPIRI research fellowship. Between 2019 and 2021, Amal was an affiliated Fellow in three research clusters in Berlin: EUME (Europe in the Middle East – The Middle East in Europe), Lateinamerika-Institut of Freie Universität Berlin, and PalREAD-Country of Words. She earned her PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Washington (2013), and is currently completing a creative nonfiction book based on her Facebook blog, “Diaries of a Hedgehog Feminist.”
Dalia Halabi is an EUME Fellow (2025/26) and a lecturer in the Department of Education at Oranim Academic College. She holds a PhD in Leadership and Policy in Education from the University of Haifa. Her doctoral research examined the formation of elite identities among Palestinian students and alumni of private schools. Adopting a “study up” approach, her work interrogates social stratification, educational inequalities and class reproduction, with particular attention to elite formation among minoritized elites. She examines how marginalized communities navigate, negotiate, and reproduce elite status within unequal social structures. She previously served as Director of Dirasat – The Arab Center for Rights and Policy and has over two decades of experience in civil society and activism, with a focus on educational justice and social equity.
Please register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
