Meenakshi Thirukode, Head of Communications and Cultural Partnerships at the Polis Project, looks at the criminalisation of dissent, the power of collective resistance, and highlights the urgent need to reclaim narratives in an era of state surveillance and control

In early March this year, Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student of the School of International and Public Affairs, and a legal permanent resident of the United States, was arrested by ICE at his residence for his active involvement in the ongoing protests against the genocide of Palestinians. His “crime” is being Palestinian.

Closer to home, Indian student Ranjani Srinivasan was picked up by the State apparatus, passing through the crowds of protesting students at Columbia University after a picnic nearby. Her “crime” at one level is that she showed support through social media posts and signatures on petitions that indicate her stance on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. Her bigger crime was living in the heart of the Empire with her humanity intact and walking past a university she attends.

Two cases of dissent and resistance in the past week that garnered attention. Two individuals seem to threaten a ‘State’ with one of the worst track records of human rights abuses and violations. Mahmoud and Ranjini and others who have also been picked up, disappeared, and deported, like the case of Dr Rasha Alawieh, is indicative of the State’s and the current administration’s perception of dissent and solidarity as an implicit alliance to Hamas and Hezbollah. These two entities, according to the United States are of course, “terrorist” organisations. And so, Mahmoud, Ranjani, and Dr Alawieh, through the Empire’s skewed understanding and representation of armed resistance, are guilty by association.

I scroll through my social media feed trying to make sense as always and also be vigilant of the narratives that need to be heard. I came across a reel by Jenan Matari. As she sits with measured grief, she swerves the camera phone to tell us who she remembers at a time when “things get extra scary”. She shows us beautifully framed photographs of her ancestors – her great-grandmother Tata Hajjs, her great-grandfather Jido Abdullah, their home they were expelled from Ein Karem, Palestine, in April 1948 during the Nakba, her grandfather Sidi Shiekh Mustafa, who she tells us “was the only sibling to leave his home in Beit Anan, Palestine in the 50’s due to Israel’s creation to make money to send back home – and always reminded us that it was our duty to return home one day when we could.” Matari, in another video, reminds us that for Palestinians hopelessness means they die.

“No one will take away my dreams” was Spanish philosopher Paul B Preciado’s way of getting to where one would like to be; where looking out to the horizons could help us move away from the wretched margins and its false equivalences. Perhaps a utopian idea, but one that is valid. What the protests have orchestrated is a set of interactions between various stakeholders in a society that have brought to the surface, violence we otherwise theorise into abstractions. And the need to therefore keep fighting with resolute faith.

Now that we can truly see, we must dream and do while operating within an evolved multi-headed hydra of surveillance capitalism, techno-oligarchies, and neoliberalism that are dictating how governments run countries.

There is therefore an urgency to understand what comes after and alongside the movements and the protests that can help break away from the endless cycle of oppressive State-sponsored institutional tactics. What kinds of political and cultural practices, actions, and organising locate temporary moments of a kind of ‘making visible’, systems of domination? What particular formations and forms of organising have changed in New York, Serbia, Berlin, and India that are addressing the entangled histories of the far right – both in its historical forms and new structures of fascism? What kind of organising is needed to problematise the institution of art, culture, education, and politics?

What does breaking away from operating within the dynamics of these systems look, and feel like? How do we move away from identitarian politics and present the potential for renewed thinking about our futures?

The intention must be to find new ways around collectivity and community. A vocabulary outside of its mass co-option of the language of resistance.

The goal in the very near future is to (re)-create a counter, embodied infrastructures and ways of working, thinking, and being together instead of re-distributing modes of domination. We need to adopt a politics of resistance against the dominant ideology of an institution as imagined by the State and Capital. We need to move away from a politics of recognition, where our existence is validated by the State on its terms, and adopt a politics that traces an ongoing practice of dissent that operates via intuition, improvisation, and documentation that tells the story of those whose dreams dare to remain their own.

Many of the answers lie in the histories of cultural production that privilege documentation of vulnerable histories, and have the potential of being erased, lost, and designated to the realm of marginal-centre binaries –  from participatory filmmaking including citizen cinema to radical publishing, exhibition-making, and autonomous collectives that refuse to be legible to state-sanctioned systems to even the simple act of making a reel to tell us a story or writing a statement as political prisoners. It can be seen in the details of the letter Mahmoud wrote while in ICE Detention where he asks “who has the right to have rights?” telling us about the Senegalese man who has been deprived of his liberty for a year and the 21-year-old detainee who stepped into the US at age nine, only to be deported without any due process. Only months ago, Electronic Initifada’s Ali Abunimah described his cell mates while being detained in Switzerland as immigrants with similar fates as those wrongfully confined by the US carceral system.

“Justice escapes the contours of the nation’s immigration facilities,” Mahmoud tells us.

Countless other Palestinian voices intersect with the voices of those that Empire’s own ontological insecurity would like to forever be a project of manipulated narratives that are pushed out through infrastructures – academic and technological – that we know by now is complicit in the genocide. Every little act of resistance therefore must be recognised for what it is and we must have faith that it counts.

Other ways in which these questions can find precedence can be located in recent cultural histories. Citizen cinema for instance had become a tool not just to document but also to politicise collective imagination into galvanising actual change in India in the late 70’s and 80’s. Archival research-based artistic practices in post-9/11 America have allowed for multiple counter-narratives of resistance within cultural, legal, and political frameworks. And if we are to think of a literal vocabulary, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s text ‘The Undercommons’ reminds us that “the only possible relationship to the university is a criminal one…” since the very nature of academia is “turning insurgents into state agents”. So resist.

“From our experience, we have come to value the independent documentary as a potent site for seeding and nurturing counter-hegemonic ideas, narratives, and languages that, given a chance at a back-and-forth communication with the wider audiences, can play a significant role in unsettling the dominant consensus – “common sense” in Gramscian terms—on matters of politics and philosophy, aesthetics and art. The documentary filmmaker then transcends her first role of a sensitive observer bearing witness to testimonies of injustice; as she also consciously intervenes with her films, by opening up questions to the wider society and listening to questions asked of her.” – Basu and Banerjee, Towards a Peoples Cinema: Independent Documentary and its Audience in India.

Yugantar Film Collective’s ‘Tambaku Chaakila Oob Aali’ questions ideas around citizenship, collectivity, feminism, and how we document and disseminate periods of history that inevitably have an impact on ideas of liberation, freedom, and autonomy. In the film, we witness how strikes led by women tobacco factory workers of Nippani set forth a larger political domino effect of many other unionising projects across India. These were women who were caste and class-marginal and were also former sex workers. Their act of resistance in the face of absolutely dire conditions is the subject of Yugantar film which in today’s context sparked this need to revisit the question of what it means to be a citizen and a feminist, within the continuum of these social, political and people’s movement histories. Deepa Dhanraj, who is part of the collective, has spoken about the complexity of being in the position of a filmmaker of a different class and caste and showing up with her colleagues to film this movement – part re-enactment and part on-the-spot documentation.

“What was very unique and new to see, even in the film practice, was how participatory one could be. How one could maintain participation, not control. How much could we bring them on board at all stages of filmmaking? Though we had the apparatus, the camera, and even the information; we acknowledged where they could influence the process. It was tedious work to show rough cuts and develop the narration iteratively… So there had to be a very respectful relationship and there may have been decisions that led to an aesthetic mess or proved to be politically a bit difficult. But once we were committed to the participatory process we had to take it to its end.” – Deepa Dhanraj in conversation with Nicole Wolfe, 2002.

The climate in 1970 – 80’s India was one of mass people-led political movements as well as from artists to students and activists who worked collectively to produce films, theater, and other visual forms of culture as collective consciousness-raising, supported by funding bodies that allowed for such practices to thrive and disseminate. As Santasil Mallik elaborates on his analysis of a film by NamaCollective, “​​English-speaking urban dominance of the new middle class in the 1990s (India)…(enabled) a “politics of forgetting” vis-a-vis social groups marginalised by India’s integration into global markets. It was not an inadvertent but an active political-discursive project that sought to construct a sanitised image of economic globalisation while naturalising its exclusions. New imaginations of citizenship emerged based on identitarian relationships with the state and capital. The corresponding construction of spatial purification further reinscribed communal divisions.”

In Afghan-American artist Mariam Ghani’s project ‘Index of the Disappeared’ the archive has taken on networked forms of exhibitions, parasitic libraries, and symposiums, offering a way to infiltrate systems through many collaborators. A collaboration with Chitra Ganesh (ongoing since 2004), the project serves primarily as a physical archive of post-9/11 disappearances.

As an archive, Index of the Disappeared highlights the complex histories of immigrant, marginalised, and dissenting communities in the U.S. since 9/11, along with the global impacts of U.S. military and intelligence interventions. Official documents, secondary literature, and personal narratives trace how censorship and information blackouts have evolved into a culture of secrecy that enabled/s mass disappearances, deportations, renditions, and detentions on an unprecedented scale.

What the Index shows us is how the process of watching and documenting the ‘State’ draws upon radical archival, legal, and activist traditions to organise and present the material. Over the years, the Index has become remarkably comprehensive, covering everything from black sites to Bagram, corporate surveillance to contract translators, Pelican Bay to the Pentagon Papers, and more. The goal of projects like the Index is not to compile every significant piece of information in the public domain but to allow for sifting through vast amounts of data to extract and preserve significant fragments, making connections that allow others to understand their deeper significance.

In navigating through projects from within Ghanis research-based archival practice and the varied Afghan-American exile’s literary contributions, the “memory” of a culture and a people are investigated from within these archives. They can then be (re)constructed and/or (re)narrated. If so, what would they reveal?

In light of the struggles of individuals like Mahmoud Khalil, Ranjini Srinivasan, and Dr. Rasha Alawieh, which is emblematic of a much larger systemic issue, these arrests, and deportations represent an urgent need to reimagine resistance in a world dominated by surveillance capitalism and authoritarian control. The question of what it means to be a citizen, an activist, and an artist within these shifting contexts is central to forging a path forward, one that is grounded in empathy, collaboration, subversion, and the pursuit of freedom and liberation for all.

Take a look at more of the fantastic work being produced by the Polis Project, here

Do you want to be informed of DiEM25's actions? Sign up here