Crisis, Again: On Solidarity

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Although I can no longer delay beginning to write this introduction, I do so with a quiet dread I can’t seem to shake—the sense that solidarity, however fiercely practised, makes no difference at all. These days, solidarity feels inconsequential—terrifyingly so—when measured against yet another act of violence, another ugly war, another televised ruin, each newly visible catastrophe eclipsing others that continue, less seen but no less ongoing.

What does it mean to practise solidarity while the world burns in such familiar ways? What happens when crisis, usually understood as that which disrupts the order of things, that causes upheaval, ceases to be exceptional because it becomes routinized? If crisis, as many scholars have argued, is an inalienable element of daily life, what would it mean to think of crisis not as a rupture but as a norm, not as an interruption but as repetition, almost staged in its predictability—such that even genocide risks being absorbed into the managed temporality of crisis itself: anticipated yet not prevented, processed, endured?

To ask this is also to ask whether solidarity can register as consequential within a temporality that absorbs upheaval in advance, rendering response both necessary and already too late. Within such a temporality, solidarity risks becoming just one response among many: urgent, and yet already folded into the performative logic of crisis itself. What comes into view, in this light, is not only the persistence of crisis but its generative force—its capacity to script response even as it seems to demand interruption. It is here, perhaps, that my dread returns: the sense that solidarity is anticipated in advance, drawn into a repetition that announces urgency even as it blunts its force.

So, I begin to see crisis less as an interruption than as a call for action that elicits its responses in advance. Crisis does not simply call forth solidarity as an ethical stance; it generates an entire field of affects and practices that extend beyond it. It produces regimes of management and endurance—humanitarian intervention, permanent refugee camps turned into cities, and governmental forms of crisis management, alongside cultural practices, mediated witnessing, and affective cycles of outrage and fatigue—that organize how violence is perceived, managed, and lived with. Yet if crisis unfolds iteratively, whatever it appears to teach us proves difficult to carry forward: the knowledge it produces does not readily translate into action capable of averting the next crisis that lurks around the corner. Instead, crisis becomes something to be recognized and managed rather than mitigated, stabilized through forms of narration, documentation, reportage, and commemoration that render it legible, normalizing its terms, even as they fold it back into a structure of repetition. This is why crisis fails to yield transferable lessons: this failure is not incidental but constitutive of its form. What is learned is absorbed into the very processes that make crisis intelligible and manageable.

Perhaps this is also why crisis seems both to incite and to dull response. It seems simultaneously to shock us into action and to numb our capacity to carry it forward. As legal philosopher Costas Douzinas observes, “the great initial shock becomes eventually comforting” (66): a comfort that gestures toward shared vulnerability—the sense that we are all in it together—even as it draws on our acclimation to crisis’s repetition, its return no longer unexpected. The regularity with which crisis appears, often predictable if not preventable, not only arises from conditions we should have learned to anticipate, but also persists as an element internal to the dynamics that produce it, moving at once as cause and effect. Marked by such performativity—what Judith Butler describes as “both the processes of being acted on and the conditions and possibilities for acting” (63)—crisis sustains its own repeatability.

Understood in this light, crisis is productive: it scripts responses in advance, distributing roles—witness, responder, aid worker, victim, spectator—while delimiting the terms under which action can appear meaningful. Solidarity is only one such script, and perhaps the one most exposed to exhaustion precisely because it remains tethered to the hope of interruption within a structure that continually reabsorbs it. What I find troubling, then, is the difficulty of locating solidarity within this terrain as both one response among others and still a practice that might unsettle the very conditions that anticipate it.

What this recognition leaves me with is not an answer but a question I cannot set aside: What becomes of solidarity within the institutions that both host and constrain its expression? And so, I turn myself closer to my task here, to grapple with the institution of the university.

I wonder what space solidarity might inhabit within the university as an institution that is supposed—at least etymologically: universitas—to be all-encompassing. As I struggle to find language adequate to introduce the five essays that comprise this special issue, I find myself thinking of the Greek word for university: panepistēmion. Παν (pan, “all”) + ἐπιστήμη (epistēmē, “knowledge, learning, science”). The root—episteme, epistemic—is familiar, yet, for the first time, I hear it distinctly as the compound it is: ἐπί (epi, “upon”) + ἵστημι (histēmi, “to stand”). Panepistēmion: that which stands upon something. To stand upon—and perhaps, inevitably, to stand for. Is it too much of a leap to move from standing upon to standing for? To stand for implies relation, commitment, a positionality that is not neutral but oriented toward others. To stand for is to stand in relation with. To stand, ultimately, in solidarity.

*

Inside the university, solidarity seems to operate on two frequencies at once. There is the solidarity directed outward, toward ongoing violences that refuse to remain outside our syllabuses and classrooms. And then there is the solidarity that circulates within the university itself—tentative, sometimes quiet, sometimes spectacular—expressed through walkouts, teach-ins, student encampments, refusals of the university’s business-as-usual operations. These gestures may illuminate the conditions and effects of the crises that call them forth, but they do not stop wars; they do not even slow them. Still, they signal a recognition that the university is not a sealed container; that what we profess and how we teach are already entangled with struggles elsewhere. The university may cultivate radical thought, but it does not necessarily embrace what such thought demands.

*

It was in this spirit that, in the summer of 2024, amid the proliferation of pro-Palestinian student encampments across campuses in North America and beyond, Canadian Literature solicited feedback from its editorial board on a statement it was considering posting regarding the student encampment, the “People’s University for Gaza,” at the University of British Columbia. The draft expressed support for the students’ “right to peacefully protest the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people” and urged UBC “to respect and defend these students’ right to do so” (“Statement of Solidarity”). It included terms—Palestinian people, genocide—that had already become, and remain, risky to utter in certain contexts; yet it stopped short of endorsing the students’ calls to action directed at the university.¹ I fired off a quick response to the journal’s managing editor, characterizing the proposed statement as “very safe”—especially given the plan not to circulate it via social media or via the journal’s newsletter—while also acknowledging that “cautiousness [was] necessary” in what I described as “difficult and dangerous times” (Kamboureli, email). Admittedly, my own response was equally measured. Referring to cautiousness allowed me both to temper my critique of the statement and to register a broader recognition: it had indeed become dangerous to say, let alone publicly support, Palestine—even wearing a button with a slogan, such as “Stop the Scholasticide,” or a watermelon brooch could invite harassment in the street.

When I thought of this email exchange later in the day, I came to understand the discomfort I had experienced when I read the message as a form of soft solidarity—an affective, attenuated, but minimally binding response: showing care without getting involved, expressing empathy rather than taking action.² It was a limit case in which solidarity seemed to emerge, only to stall before becoming praxis. It acknowledged a crisis, but did so without adopting a combative stance against entrenched power structures, such as the university; it gestured toward allyship through recognition, but stopped short of demanding transformation.

I suggested that the journal consider planning a special issue on solidarity and, without thinking twice, offered to guest-edit it. I want to thank Christine Kim, Canadian Literature’s editor at the time, for her enthusiastic response—for giving me the space to dwell in these questions within the very institution that both enables and constrains such work; to sit with the difficulty of what solidarity might mean; to work through the uncertainties that surround it; and to create space for other scholars, as well as myself, to ask what, if anything, solidarity can still do—ethically, politically, aesthetically—under conditions that seem at once to anticipate and absorb it in advance.

*

My exchange with Canadian Literature’s managing editor came in the wake of the Ontario Superior Court hearings of June 19 and 20, 2024, on the University of Toronto’s injunction to call in police against its own students, who had set up an encampment at King’s College Circle at the heart of the downtown St. George campus, right across from Simcoe Hall, where the offices of the president and the board of governors are both located. I attended those hearings holding onto a cautious hope that the injunction might be denied. It was not.

On July 2, the decision approving the injunction came down (Ontario, University para. 220): the encampment had until six o’clock the next evening to clear or be cleared (Office of the President; Ontario, Court File 2). The students decided to avoid confrontation. They dismantled the camp themselves.

I joined the trash team early the following morning to fold tarps and to sort what could be stored, redistributed, or discarded. Later, faculty lined up our cars, each of us heading to a different destination to deliver sleeping bags, blankets, and food to homeless encampments that the students had already located across the city. Their mapping exceeded mine. Their care extended beyond the university.

It was a little after five when I drove back to campus after my last delivery. King’s College Circle was already empty. What remained were a lawn thinned to brown patches of withered grass outlining where tents had stood and a white papier-mâché olive tree at the centre. It was difficult not to summon to mind what had filled that space over the last two months: the mingling of voices, the well-stocked kitchen tent with its bins and coolers, platters of sliced watermelon and bowls of grapes set out within reach, children running with kites, white tables dressed with tablecloths and flowers to celebrate Eid, Palestinian flags fluttering in the breeze, and the steady drift of onlookers—activists, union members, Zionist counter-protesters, tourists, families with strollers. Even now that the students had decamped, a few onlookers lingered, some scanning the ground, others seeming visibly deflated at having missed the spectacle of conflict they had expected, shaped in part by scenes of police removals on US campuses. The emptiness of what only a day earlier had been a vital space was painful. And yet that circle held something else: painted across the ground, the words WE WILL RETURN marked not capitulation but refusal. The students had accepted the ultimatum and chosen to leave on their own terms, refusing to ratify the administration’s insistence on casting them as violent and unruly. Come six o’clock, they were already gathered a few metres south of the circle, voices rising, signs and flags lifted, the march beginning to move through campus and beyond—efficiency as resolve, as solidarity.

The olive tree did not last long. Within the hour, it was knocked off its base by anti-Palestinian protesters carrying an Israeli flag; shortly after, its trunk and branches were removed by campus staff. I saw in that gesture an echo of other removals: olive trees uprooted in the West Bank, severed from land and heritage, targeted precisely because of what they embody. The gap that the missing olive tree left behind condensed something about this scene: the vulnerability of what is collectively made and the force required to undo it.

What Meric Gertler, then president of the University of Toronto, described as an “unauthorized encampment” occupying shared university space (qtd. in CityNews), I had come to know as a village. Not metaphorically, but materially: a space organized around care and coexistence. There were food tents, storage areas, medical and prayer spaces, conflict-resolution circles, gathering spots under the shade of trees—structures not imposed from above but emerging through collective governance. It was diverse, interfaith, nonhierarchical, and porous. It drew students from across Toronto, as well as faculty, long-time activists, and passing visitors. It sustained a dense rhythm of life: Shabbat gatherings, family hours, teach-ins. When Dene scholar Glen Coulthard came to the encampment in solidarity on June 9, students took up his account of Indigenous resistance and resurgence to think solidarity across struggles, finding in it not merely an analogy, but something they could carry into their own Palestinian cause. And when Toronto filmmaker b.h. Yael screened her new documentary, Letter to My Tribe, on a makeshift screen under a tree one evening, the space echoed other village squares in Israel and the West Bank where film might circulate as shared conversation rather than spectacle. That evening, Yael’s film made solidarity legible to me in its generosity and contradictions: the alignment and kinship among the spectators echoed, yet remained unsettled, in the film’s Israeli and West Bank sites of friction and community, trauma and resistance, aspirations for justice, and uneasy proximity.

The encampment also made visible the conditions under which the university rendered that space legible. Floodlights—the kind used at construction sites, in carceral yards, and along border zones—burned through the night from the surrounding buildings. Their glare turned the village into a scene of enforced visibility. If this was a panopticon, it was inverted: surveillance emanated from the outside, illuminating the inside, exposing not only the encampment but also the institution’s need to monitor and contain it. And yet the village refused that logic of containment. It did not hide.

Occupy UofT for Palestine took shape as a counterinstitution within the institution—never sealing itself off, remaining permeable, emanating hospitality. As for the “irreparable harm” the court held the university to have suffered because of the encampment (Ontario, University paras. 10, 220), it remains difficult to locate. Unless, perhaps, one counts the grass.

*

When the UBC encampment was dismantled, pre-empting Canadian Literature’s proposed statement and leading the journal not to issue it, the distinction I had been trying to articulate sharpened: solidarity is not the same as recognizing the right to protest. One can affirm protest and remain at once untouched by and in alignment with what it seeks.

What I had been tracking became a problem of position. If, as media scholar Lilie Chouliaraki argues, the contemporary spectator of suffering dwells in an ambivalent space between skepticism and action—what she calls the condition of the “ironic spectator” (2)—then the question was no longer whether to respond, but how not to remain suspended in ambivalence. This question shaped my decision to propose this special issue.

But why return to solidarity? Why take up the subject again when I had already done so two years earlier (Kamboureli, “Introduction I” 7)? Had my understanding of what I then called its aporia shifted? I had argued that solidarity demands an attention to incommensurability (9): to the conditions that render some losses visible, grievable, actionable, and others not. That it remains contingent, agonistic, structurally unfinished (11). That it resists closure. Since no ethical turn guarantees arrival, no practice delivers us to a stable end. Ethics, in this sense, “has no tolerance for teleology” (Kamboureli, “Limits” 938). But if that remains true, why was I returning to it?

Partly because the university made—makes—the return to questions of solidarity unavoidable. For example, how can one reconcile the administration’s invocation of private property in its request for an injunction against the student protestors with its ritual repetition of land acknowledgements? What does it mean to insist on jurisdiction while staging dispossession as acknowledgement? The contradiction was not a matter of the administration alone. It also implicated me as a settler.

Partly, too, because this was not my first return to solidarity. My earlier editorial work on peacekeeping and humanitarian narratives—on Somalia, on Rwanda—had already been structured by crisis, by response, by the desire to intervene in Canadian imaginaries of benevolence (see Härting and Kamboureli; Kamboureli, “Writing”). Each project took shape as a response to urgency and, in doing so, revealed the iterative form of crisis itself. It seems that one does not exit this structure. One remains and repeats, with variation.

Perhaps, then, because this persistence confirms what Chouliaraki names “‘egoistic altruism’” (4): a mode of ironic solidarity that risks centring the ethical subject even as it gestures outward, turning ethical engagement into a contingent and potentially self-serving stance. Solidarity, in this instance, veers toward an affective posture.

Or perhaps it is something else: the recognition that solidarity, lacking as it does teleology, cannot simply be completed or left behind. It needs to be rehearsed.

In each of these possible instances, the university appears not as a neutral ground but as a porous formation—exposed to the urgencies that exceed it. Such editorial interventions both respond to and reproduce crisis, revealing its iterative structure while attempting, however falteringly, to interrupt it.

*

The essays gathered in this special issue take solidarity not as a slogan but as a situated practice—one that unfolds across aesthetic forms, cultural investments, political commitments, and pedagogical relations. Together, they insist that solidarity operates not on a single scale but across uneven and often conflicting terrains. Moving from a rarefied, star-studded literary gala to a student encampment, from pandemic-born virtual storymaking to entangled human and more-than-human relations in language and on the land, from a courtroom and a jail on the Pacific Coast to the disaster zones of wars and refugee camps in the Global South, the essays map a dispersed field of encounters. This geographical and experiential breadth is not incidental to solidarity. It makes visible solidarity’s constitutive complexity: its mediation by place and history and its formation within asymmetrical relations of access and power. It is precisely across such disparate terrains that solidarity emerges as complex, contingent, and often fraught, rather than given or guaranteed.

The issue opens with an essay by Laura Moss that reconstructs the controversy surrounding the 2023–24 Giller Prize. Taking as her starting point the “discomfort” she felt upon hearing Anne Michaels’ 2024 Giller Prize acceptance speech for her poetic novel Held, a speech in which Michaels “used the word solidarity five times” in five minutes (24), she brings questions of aesthetics, politics, and cultural capital into focus, asking what it means for literary prestige to have been implicated in broader structures of complicity and violence. “Is Oblique Solidarity Enough? Rethinking the 2024 (Scotiabank) Giller Prize Controversy” juxtaposes public statements, petitions, boycotts, and other literary discourses to map a field of competing solidarities. Reading across these materials, Michaels’ novel, and book-length interventions by writers such as Omar El Akkad, Moss offers a relational analysis of voice, silence, and moral address. She does not adjudicate positions; instead, she attends to the conditions under which solidarity is articulated, withheld, or displaced. She brings these strands together through her concept of oblique solidarity, which names forms of affiliation that operate by implication rather than declaration: solidarity that is neither fully articulated nor entirely absent, but angled, partial, and strategically indeterminate (echoing what I call above “soft solidarity”). Moss reads this deliberately oblique solidarity as both a rhetorical mode and a political problem. Such indirection, she suggests, may at times be necessary—for example, under conditions of censorship, risk, or the desire to maintain broad forms of affiliation—but, in moments of crisis, oblique solidarity can also register as a form of evasion, allowing ethical positioning to remain suggestive rather than accountable. In this sense, the unease Michaels’ speech generated for Moss becomes a diagnostic lens through which Moss examines both the limits of solidarity when its object remains unnamed and the imperative to understand solidarity as historically embedded.

If Moss’ essay engages with the limits of oblique solidarity at the level of discourse, the essay that follows shifts the question of solidarity from speech to practice, tracing how solidarity is materialized, negotiated, and improvised through situated practice and the embodied labour of inhabiting the margins within the fraught terrain of the university itself. In “When You Can’t Say Palestine: Toward a Pedagogy of Encampment,” Natalie Leduc resists the comfort of retrospective distance. Their narrative, composed in a hybrid mode that moves between testimony, theory, and pedagogical manifesto, emerges from within the overlapping roles of PhD candidate, instructor, and encampment participant at the Occupy UofT for Palestine encampment. Structured in discrete sections—“Disclose,” “Divest,” “Cut Ties”—“When You Can’t Say Palestine” reads both as a theoretical position and a call to action. This structure enables Leduc to assemble their lived experience in encampments alongside classroom practices, activist discourse, and critical theory to produce what they define as a “pedagogy of encampment” (46). Encampment functions in this essay not only as an event or site, but as a set of practices transferable across spaces that reconfigure teaching and learning as acts of collective care, refusal, and political commitment. As both student and instructor within this pedagogy of encampment, Leduc becomes their own text of study. They foreground their own precarity—a precarity at once representative of, marginal to, and “disposable” within the university (44)—as the condition through which they both enact and interrogate solidarity. From this vantage point, they reconsider the margins not merely as sites of exclusion but as tactical locations of abandonment, relationality, and collective survival. Drawing on Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s Undercommons, as well as on Black and decolonial feminist thought, Leduc reframes solidarity as a practice of abandoning the university from within, a mode of inhabiting institutional space while withholding full consent to its logics of enclosure, hierarchy, and legitimacy. This stance binds together the encampment, the classroom, and other sites of struggle as spaces shaped by asymmetrical power, where solidarity emerges through mutual aid, vulnerability, and alignment with those most structurally excluded.

The essay that follows continues this attention to solidarity as situated practice within and against university life, as Markus Harwood-Jones turns from the encampment-classroom to a virtual pedagogical space, forged under pandemic conditions, where questions of care, accountability, and collective formation are differently configured but remain closely connected. Centred on the Three Hares Collective’s collaborative Transformative Storytelling project—a virtual creative writing workshop for trans, Two-Spirit, and nonbinary authors—Harwood-Jones situates solidarity within what he terms “messy methods” and “emergent ethics” (60). Moving between project narrative, theoretical reflection, and methodological critique, he traces how solidarity was materially realized through difficult decisions he and the two other members of the collective faced about access, participation, and care. When moments of crisis emerged, for example, because of the project’s overenrollment, these moments served as sites where institutional protocols, such as standardized ethics procedures and equity frameworks, encountered their limits, requiring the collective to develop situated and provisional responses. Writing from a position that straddles academic research and community collaboration, Harwood-Jones attends to the relational and uneven dynamics that emerged within the collective its founders worked, drawing attention to questions of power, accountability, and benefit within institutional research frameworks. Engaging with sociologist John Law and writer-activist adrienne maree brown, among others, Harwood-Jones approaches mess not as methodological failure but as an enabling condition: a recognition, first, that research processes both shape and are shaped by their social and cultural contexts and, second, that ethical responsibility must remain adaptive, dialogic, and responsive to unfolding conditions. Thus, by treating pedagogy as a process of collaborative knowledge-making rather than a progression toward a fixed outcome, Harwood-Jones reframes both research and teaching as practices of collective survival, emphasizing improvisation, relational accountability, and the ongoing reworking of ethical commitments. In this context, solidarity appears less as a matter of consensus than as an ongoing negotiation marked by competing needs, partial solutions, and inevitable exclusions.

If Harwood-Jones’ essay locates solidarity in the shifting ethics and pedagogies of collaborative, virtual practice, Payal Nagpal and Kit Dobson relocate the question of solidarity to the domain of poetics, asking how literary form itself—within and beyond institutional frameworks—can produce and maintain solidarity across human and more-than-human relations. Reading Rita Wong’s body of work through the lens of what Joan Retallack calls poethics, Nagpal and Dobson argue that Wong’s poetry brings aesthetic practice into ongoing relation with ethical and political commitments. Situating Wong as a poet-activist working on unceded Coast Salish territories, they trace how her writing, public statements, and acts of protest—particularly her arrest and incarceration for opposing the Trans Mountain Pipeline—exemplify an ongoing practice of solidarity grounded in Wong’s recognition of ecological responsibility, Indigenous sovereignty, and diasporic accountability. In Wong’s poetic and critical writings, solidarity emerges not as abstract affiliation but as a materially and relationally grounded commitment that extends beyond the human to encompass land, water, and more-than-human life. Combining close reading, archival reconstruction, and attention to literary reception, Nagpal and Dobson’s essay shows how Wong’s poetics can be understood as modelling collective, dehierarchized modes of being. Formal features—such as Wong’s use of lowercase, multilingual layering, and collaborative authorship—operate as aesthetic enactments of relationality that unsettle the bounded lyric subject and privilege interdependence over individualism. By tracing the reverberations of Wong’s actions in literary communities and activist networks, Nagpal and Dobson frame her poetry as a site where imaginative practice and political action meet. In their reading, solidarity is not only represented in literature, but also realized through it as a dispersed, iterative, and “poethical” force that circulates across texts, bodies, and social movements (77).

David Jefferess’ essay shifts our attention from poetry as a site where solidarity is enacted through form and relation to humanitarian discourse. In “The White Gaze of Development in Samantha Nutt’s Humanitarian Memoir-festo, Damned Nations,” Jefferess examines how narratives of humanitarian intervention in situations of crisis produce, circulate and, at times, constrain what can be recognized as solidarity. His reading of Samantha Nutt’s 2011 national bestseller, Damned Nations: Greed, Guns, Armies, and Aid, which he describes as a “humanitarian memoir-festo” (93), stages the question of solidarity within the Global South while simultaneously probing the colonial logics that underwrite Western humanitarianism, from aid practices to their textual representations. Nutt’s memoir, he argues, is a text that seems to “work against itself” (108): its emphases on witness and affective authority risk rendering the lives of racialized others tragic and partial, ultimately legible only through the mediation of Nutt’s white humanitarian gaze. With his contextual and close reading of Damned Nations, Jefferess critiques how the book mobilizes affect to solicit readerly sympathy and support for humanitarian agencies, positioning the reader as a bystander, a vicarious witness to suffering whose response must be engaged to endorse a “just cause” (102). He further challenges the race-neutral veneer of the text’s humanitarian discourse, showing how victimhood is racially coded and care unevenly distributed. In reproducing white feminist and developmental logics of progress, Jefferess suggests, Nutt’s narrative models extraction rather than solidarity. Ultimately, in the absence of genuinely mutual relations, her text falls short of realizing the self-reflexive critique it promises.

Taken together, these essays do not resolve the aporia of solidarity; they inhabit it. They do not offer a blueprint for how solidarity should work but attend to how it does work—unevenly, imperfectly, and always in relation. Across encampments, poems, classrooms, humanitarian regimes, and literary institutions, solidarity appears here not as the act that ends violence, but as the relation that insists on remaining answerable to it. In highlighting its dynamic relationality, this special issue affirms solidarity as an ongoing practice of standing with and for others—within, against, and beyond the university.

 

Acknowledgements

I owe immense thanks to amanda wan, Canadian Literature’s journal assistant, for their extraordinary professionalism and care; no matter how small or large, urgent or routine, my queries were always met with prompt, thoughtful, and clear responses. Brianne Colon, the journal’s managing editor, has been a constant presence throughout, generous with her insights, time, and support. Mary Chapman, Canadian Literature editor, has been there at every stage with unwavering encouragement and trust. I’m especially grateful to Mary and the journal’s editorial assistant for their astute and genuinely generous editorial care. To the six authors of the compelling essays in this special issue, my deepest thanks for responding to my call and for the rigour and acuity with which they have helped shape and propel the conversation forward.

 

Notes

1. The UBC Asian Canadian Research and Engagement and the Asian Canadian Asian Migration Studies (ACAM) programs expressed their solidarity on May 4, 2024, by adopting the students’ calls for divesting from companies profiting from the genocide and the oppression of Palestinians, supporting the global academic boycott of Israeli state institutions, and condemning genocide and scholasticide.
2. I have since discovered that “soft solidarity” is already in circulation as a term, though it carries a different, almost opposite, meaning. See, for example, Horgan; see also “Soft Solidarity (SoS),” which records a 2022 exhibition in New York’s Pearl River Mart Gallery. Curator Joyce Yu-Jean Lee defines soft solidarity as “not a concrete allegiance,” but “a loose sense of unification . . . the political notion of soft power, about being diplomatic rather than aggressively carrying a big stick to reconcile conflict and woo opponents” (qtd. in “Soft Solidarity”).

 

Works Cited

Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Harvard UP, 2015.

“CanLit Solidarity Statement for UBC Encampment.” Canadian Literature office, email attachment, 28 June 2024.

Chouliaraki, Lilie. The Ironic Spectator: Solidarity in the Age of Post-Humanitarianism. Polity Press, 2013.

“University of Toronto President Offers Agreement to Students Conditional on Encampment Clearing.” OMNI Television, 24 May 2024, https://omnitv.ca/university-of-toronto-president-offers-agreement-to-students-conditional-on-encampment-clearing.

Douzinas, Costas. Philosophy and Resistance in the Crisis. Polity Press, 2013.

Härting, Heike, and Smaro Kamboureli, editors. Discourses of Security, Peacekeeping Narratives, and the Cultural Imagination in Canada, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 78, no. 2, 2009, https://utppublishing.com/toc/utq/78/2.

Horgan, Mervyn. “Interaction, Indifference, Injustice: Elements of a Normative Theory of Urban Solidarity.” Interrogating the Social: A Critical Sociology for the Twenty-First Century, edited by Fuyuki Kurasawa, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017, pp. 61–93.

Kamboureli, Smaro. Email to Canadian Literature office. 28 June 2024.

—. “Introduction I: Literary Solidarities: ‘Should I Be Here?’” Literary Solidarities/Critical Accountability: A Mikinaakominis/TransCanadas Special Issue, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, edited by Kamboureli and Tania Aguila-Way, vol. 89, no. 1, 2022, pp. 1–22, https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.89.1.01.

—. “The Limits of the Ethical Turn: Troping Towards the Other, Yann Martel, and Self.” University of Toronto Quarterly, vol. 76, no. 3, 2017, pp. 937–61, https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.76.3.937.

—. “Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives.” Writing the Foreign in Canadian Literature and Humanitarian Narratives, special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, edited by Kamboureli, vol. 82, no. 2, 2013, pp. 87–126, https://doi.org/10.3138/UTQ.82.2.87.

Letter to My Tribe. Directed by b. h. Yael, 2024.

Office of the President. “Injunction Granted to End the Encampment.” University of Toronto, 2 July 2024, https://president.utoronto.ca/injunction-granted-to-end-the-encampment.

Ontario Superior Court of Justice. Court File CV-24-00720977-0000. 2 July 2024. University of Toronto Faculty Association, https://utfa.org/sites/default/files/factum_of_the_intervener_-_utfa_-_june_11_2024.pdf.

—. University of Toronto (Governing Council) v. Doe et al. 2 July 2024. CanLII, https://canlii.ca/t/k5l9q.

“Soft Solidarity (SoS)—Uniting to Protect, Heal, and Empower.” Google Arts and Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/story/soft-solidarity-sos-uniting-to-protect-heal-and-empower-asian-american-arts-alliance/KwWxsQ1zJzTdUQ?hl=en. Accessed on 21 May 2026.

“Statement of Solidarity with the ‘People’s University for Gaza’ Encampment at UBC.” Asian Canadian and Asian Migration Studies, 4 May 2024, https://acam.arts.ubc.ca/statement-of-solidarity-with-the-peoples-university-for-gaza-encampment-at-ubc.

 

Smaro Kamboureli is professor of Canadian literatures at the University of Toronto. Her most recent publication is Land Relations: Possibilities of Justice in Canadian Literatures (2023), which she co-edited with Larissa Lai. She is currently at work on a book on Inuit storytelling, focusing on Isuma films.