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Abstract

In a climate marked by the rise of global fascism, yoga is often appropriated toward the reproduction of caste supremacist and ethnonational agendas, colonial and racial capitalist relations, and neoliberal spirituality. Still, it has also been harnessed for collective liberation. We see this through the effort of Gaza-based yoga teacher, Hadeel Al-Gharbawi, using trauma-informed yoga to help the children of Al-Jawad Camp cultivate endurance during a genocide, and the solidarity of practitioners activating yoga toward Palestinian self-determination. This article examines the social and political activities of Yogis for Palestine (YFP), a Philadelphia-based collective whose vision for collective liberation includes unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people, through the lens of critical yoga studies scholarship and a transnational, anti-imperial feminist framework. YFP emerged in 2021 and was activated toward political action in 2023 during the U.S.-backed Zionist entity’s genocidal campaign of state-sanctioned terror. Situating paradigms of decoloniality, transnational solidarity, and anti-imperial feminisms in conversation with yoga studies and healing justice scholarship, I use autoethnographic narrative and qualitative one-on-one interviews (10) with participants involved in the collective and Hadeel Al-Gharbawi to archive and analyze the efforts of YFP. Organizing my findings into three themes that capture YFP’s work: 1) Politicizing Yoga toward Anti-imperial Feminism; 2) Curating Public Space for Collective Grief; and 3) Activating Yogis Toward Solidarity with Gaza, this research exemplifies how cultural collectives can activate traditions like yoga as sites for politicized care, transnational solidarity, and anti-imperial resistance to empire – while still pushing solidarity activists to contemplate the challenges and embedded hierarchies of politicizing care work during this stage of genocidal devastation in Gaza and across the region.

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