The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies more

ACR lT uBR A l A u E D I T E D B Y Mapping the Field TAR I K SAB RY STu D I ES 7 The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies Helga Tawil-Souri Politics runs in our blood (Palestinian idiom) On one of my research trips to the Palestinian Territories, I attended a photography exhibition at the Khalil Sakakini Cultural Centre in Ramallah. A dozen large-scale photographs portrayed close-ups of fabrics demarcating non-existent doorways between one ‘house’ and another in a local refugee camp. At the reception afterwards, I overhead two men talking: both disappointed that the photographer had chosen to focus on colourful textiles rather than the ugliness of Palestinian refugees’ lives. Certainly, the colours were jumping off the walls in a vibrant spectrum that spoke nothing of refugees’ political conditions. There were no Palestinians in the photographs, no wide-angle shots of the camps, no explanation of the refugees’ status. Did there need to be, I wondered? On numerous trips to Palestine, I went to as many cultural events as I could: concerts, films and theatre productions. I did the same in Nablus, Jenin, Jericho, Jerusalem, everywhere – often with little success, as not many cultural events were available. In Gaza, I found an array of graffiti, met multimedia artists, interviewed staff at the Palestinian Broadcasting Company (PBC), and attended more films. It struck me that most cultural modes were crudely jingoistic, wallowing in Palestinian losses since 1948. 138 Helga Tawil-Souri The photography exhibition at Sakakini was anomalous. The two complainers would have been content with the other cultural forms I came across. I had my own complaint: that contemporary cultural artefacts shared a common ‘lack’ of creativity. Most incorporated similar symbols: the black, white, red and green colours of the flag, a dove, a kuffiyah, barbed wired, or the Dome of the Rock, referring to al-Nakba (the 1948 catastrophe), to sieges, checkpoints, or the ugliness of camps. I found it stifling that the cultural records of Palestine only reflected its political horrors, with occupation, exile, loss, violence. I exaggerate, but only a little. The conversation I overheard strengthened my observation that cultural expressions – photographs, feature films, graffiti, musical compositions, or what have you – weren’t deemed ‘Palestinian’ or Palestinian ‘enough’ if they didn’t depict political ‘realities’. I later read an interview with Elia Suleiman, a Palestinian filmmaker who has portrayed ‘Palestine’ in absurdist, vague and ironic ways, much to the dismay of Palestinian audiences. Suleiman lamented how, after a screening of his 1996 Chronicle of a Disappearance, ‘in the West Bank the public took offense because these people [in the film] didn’t take up arms! [ ... Suleiman was criticised] for not showing them [Palestinians] more as targets of Israeli violence’.1 Suleiman’s films are extremely political, they’re just not crudely so. In his words, he produces films ‘beyond the ideological definition or representation of what it is to be Palestinian ... Any artistic creation expresses the identity of a person – a political being – but an identity constantly seeking itself, in perpetual transition, antinationalist. It’s in this sense that art is political’.2 In countless Palestinian films, there were explicit political tropes from which it seemed impossible to break free. Again, Suleiman was an anomaly; I wondered what this meant about Palestinian cultural expression. Was there something intrinsic in the Palestinian (political) condition that made only a specific kind of cultural expression and hermeneutics possible? Palestinian cultural studies does not formally exist as an accepted field of study: there is no scholarship that addresses the idea comprehensively. There are neither journals devoted to the subject matter, nor such an academic ‘major’. There has of course been a substantial amount of scholarship on Palestine, on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and issues relating to them; but a focus on culture has largely been secondary. The absence of cultural studies and of culture that is ‘apolitical’ (that is not related to any political/ The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 139 national ‘cause’) seemed obvious when I reflected on a reason: they have to do with the preoccupation with political aspects that are deemed to be more important. After all, Palestinians still lack the fundamental contemporary political condition of a nation-state. They live either in exile, in refugee camps, or in Bantustans surrounded by walls and checkpoints. Who has time to ‘create’, let alone to study culture when there are more important – political – issues to contend with? I let about a decade pass following these observations. I went back to the origins of cultural studies and the debates on the relationship between culture and ‘non-culture’, between culture and politics, between base and superstructure. It helped that over this past decade an increasing number of scholars – Palestinian, Israeli and others – were fomenting the beginnings of what can be termed a Palestinian cultural studies. This body of work is anything but ‘apolitical’, for it explores the everyday manifestations of Palestinian politics in a range of cultural and media artefacts and, more importantly, expresses the relations and tensions between culture and politics. I recognised that the strength of both Palestinian cultural production and the study thereof is precisely in – often overt, sometimes, unfortunately, crude – the focus on the political. There were irreducible historicalspatial conditions that made it so. This was not something to lament but to embrace. My focus in this chapter is precisely on the relationship between the cultural and the political. My argument is that, first, the very act of ‘creating culture’ in the contemporary period is a form of political resistance – a problematic statement which I attend to by explaining the political conditions against and with which Palestinians have to contend. Second, given these conditions, the study of Palestinian culture is also a form of political resistance. I argue that the resistance at the heart of the two ‘analytics’ (culture and cultural studies) – which are naturally inter-related – are imperative. Creating culture is political resistance The Palestinian people do not exist. Golda Meir. Sunday Times, London, 15 June 1969. The study of culture cannot take place outside the historical, political, geographical and socio-economic contexts that determined it, nor the 140 Helga Tawil-Souri theoretical formations that shaped it. As Hall (1980) observed, the dominant paradigm in cultural studies conceptualizes culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history ... It defines ‘culture’ as both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationship, through which they ‘handle’ and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those ‘understandings’ are expressed and in which they are embodied.3 In other words, I take heed of Raymond Williams’ argument that culture is ‘a whole way of life’.4 To study culture, then, is to study the relationships between the elements of the sum of the inter-relationships of this whole way of life, and not to deny the dialectic between the cultural and the political, nor to approach them as separate entities. This approach, however, has almost entirely disappeared from contemporary cultural studies. As Paul Smith argues, in its appropriation of structuralism in the 1970s, cultural studies chose to collapse the political into the cultural, or, at best, place them at a great distance from each other.5 This bifurcation defused cultural studies’ critical practice, led scholars to abandon a materialist understanding of culture, and to retreat from what they saw as the (economic) overdetermination of Marxism.6 The debate continues, receding in the rear-view mirror, between proponents of cultural studies and political economists,7 although, on the whole, contemporary studies of culture are often void of larger political discussions.8 In the Palestinian landscape, the opposite is true: there is an inherent and on-going relationship (sometimes a tension) between the political and the cultural. ‘Palestinian sociology has been enveloped by incessant intrusions of politics into its agenda, its motifs, and even its methodology’.9 The same is true of Palestinian cultural studies. In order to understand why this is, it is essential to address historical conditions. The intellectual formations of scholars engaged in the study of Palestinian media and culture, implicitly or explicitly, respond to a particular historical moment: that of the Nakba. As Joseph Massad (2008) and others10 have claimed, however, the Nakba The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 141 is not simply a catastrophic historical event of the past, but is ‘pulsating with life and coursing through history by piling up more calamities upon the Palestinian people [ ... ] The history of the Nakba has never been a history of the past but decidedly a history of the present’.11 Palestinian cultural studies – as Palestinian culture itself – is a means to this on-going catastrophe, to make known and slowly redress the dispossession at the heart of the Palestinian experience. Countering erasures Various forms of repression impinge upon Palestinian cultural production: by Zionist narratives, the Israeli state, Arab ‘host’ governments, such as Lebanon and Syria, an Orientalist and Islamophobic environment in the diaspora, corruption and nepotism within the Palestinian Authority (PA). Of the measures attempting to silence Palestinians, both in the territories and on the global landscape, none are as harsh as Zionist/Israeli measures, particularly as concerns the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, Jerusalem, and Palestinians within Israel. As the cultural anthropologist, Ted Swedenburg, observed over two decades ago: ‘because Israeli policies concentrate so ferociously on disintegrating all cultural forms that evoke the national reality, Palestinians carefully protect the memory of those same symbols’.12 The historian, Gabriel Piterberg, shows how Zionism is built on foundational myths that have erased Palestinians, beginning with the land and the discourse of that land. The land, too, was condemned to an exile as long as there was no Jewish sovereignty over it. It lacked any meaningful or authentic history, awaiting redemption with the return of the Jews. The best-known Zionist slogan, ‘a land without a people for a people without a land’, expressed a twofold denial: of the historical experience both of the Jews in exile, and of Palestine without Jewish sovereignty [ ... ] The Zionist settlers were collective subjects who acted, and the native Palestinians became objects acted upon.13 This is the case not only with the land, but also in all ‘geographies’ of Palestine: economic, political and cultural. As the film scholar, Haim Bresheeth, notes, Israel ‘has consistently refused to allow the Palestinians to commemorate their own history. Power is not only exercised over the 142 Helga Tawil-Souri land and its people, it also controls the story, its point of view, and the meta-narrative of truth and memory’.14 Bresheeth continues to explain that, ‘the narrative of Palestine in the cultural arena carved by Zionism is, first and foremost, a story of erasure, denial, and active silencing’.15 The traumatic disposition of fighting against the notion that they do not exist, and against their real and symbolic erasure from the land, has informed and shaped Palestinian cultural works. It is in response to these attempted erasures that scholars, such as Edward Said, have asked for ‘permission to narrate’ (1984) against the fact that ‘so much of our history has been occluded. We are invisible people’.16 In similar vein, Hamid Dabashi, when denoting Palestinian cinema, speaks of an ‘aesthetic of the invisible’ (2006). Countering this hegemonic attempt at silencing and erasing, the very act of ‘creating culture’ is a form of political resistance. By saying this, I am not pitting ‘culture’ against ‘non-culture’.17 Culture is what is created, performed, negotiated, disseminated in everyday lived experience – from cooking to folklore, from cinema to music, by the bourgeoisie and the fellaheen. In that sense, much of what we do is the process of creating culture, but given Palestinians’ political condition, their cultural praxis – whether of the everyday, the institutional, the mundane, or the monumental – is an act of resistance, because it de facto attempts to reverse Golda Meir’s fiat that Palestinians do not exist. More complicated than that, it attempts to negate subjugation and silencing. Palestinian culture is the attempt to re-voice the silences of the witnesses, victims, and historical ‘losers’ (i.e., Palestinians) to ‘re-write’ the historical truth of events in Israel/Palestine, before and after 1948. Most forcefully, when under direct occupation by Israel between 1967 and 1991,18 Palestinians were forbidden expression of anything deemed ‘nationalist’: drawing the flag was forbidden, graffiti were forbidden, the production of local media was forbidden (with the exception of highly controlled and censored news, which the Israeli military allowed as a means of feeling the pulse of political moods). By no means did the ‘end’ of official occupation in 1991 and the arrival of the PA in 1993 mean that efforts to silence and erase Palestinians have stopped – if anything, they have sometimes taken a more ruthless form. Regardless of the lifting of the ban on cultural/media production inside the Territories, silencing policies continue. An example from the period of the Second Intifada will suffice to make my point. During West Bank incursions by the Israeli defence The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 143 Forces (IDF) in the spring of 2002, cultural institutions were ransacked (including the Sakakini Centre where I had seen the photography exhibition). The national radio station building and transmission tower were bombed;19 television stations were destroyed or their transmissions ‘interrupted’ by the Israeli military (broadcasting pornographic material in some instances!); Internet companies’ computers were smashed or stolen; local and international TV stations’ headquarters were shot at, their archives stolen (‘confiscated’ in IDF parlance); radio stations were under continuous gun-fire – in its foray, the IDF also razed refugee camps; destroyed streets and houses; killed civilians; uprooted trees, and much more.20 That the IDF chose to target its destruction and violence on cultural institutions is not only reminiscent of similar events in Beirut in 1982 (when official Palestinian archives were confiscated by the IDF, and still today lie under Israeli military ‘protection’), but are indicative of Israel’s policy of erasing Palestinian history and silencing Palestinian culture (especially poignant in the theft of archives). These moments are markers in the enduring attempt by the Zionist/Israeli ‘machine’ to write history according to its own vision or, at least, to erase anything that is counter to its narrative.21 As such, any effort by Palestinians to do the opposite is nothing short of resistance. In the global landscape, Palestinians’ history is still marginal and often actively marginalised (most obviously in the USA). Palestinians continue to be vulnerable victims of history, belonging to a world politics larger than themselves, in which they have very little control over their own image.22 Their story is continuously co-opted by others (and for various reasons): Zionists, Israel, Arab governments, Hezbollah, foreign media, foreign peace activists, Islamists, news sound bites, and so on. Only recently have the tables begun to turn, although the task still seems Sisyphean. The ‘creating of culture’ has also taken nationalised, institutional form since the PA came into power in 1993 in the Territories – before that, the PLO and other political parties supported cultural activities in exile. Although the PA’s ideological and political reasons for encouraging cultural expression are complex, this did signify the authorisation and sanctioning of official Palestinian self-expression, on Palestinian land, for the first time in modern history. The creation of the PBC (the national TV station) and the financing of cultural projects, for example, should be understood within this context.23 144 Helga Tawil-Souri The ramifications of the political on Palestinian culture are formidable. It is no wonder, then, as Said explains, that even the most private forms of cultural expression are political: ‘there is no necessary contradiction between aesthetic merit and political themes. In the Arab and specifically the Palestinian case, aesthetics and politics are intertwined’.24 Due to everpresent repression, obstruction, control, surveillance and silencing, the task of Palestinian culture has become the negotiation between the everyday and the extreme; between the continuation of normalcy (as all cultural expression somewhat is), and a battle against eradication. Resistance is imperative.25 Consequently, Palestinian cultural expressions serve multiple political functions: a mnemonic device, an elegiac operation, a testimony, a form of self-identification, a voice for mobilisation – for Palestinians and other audiences. They are not simply about the transformative power of culture to liberate Palestine from colonial occupation, but about resisting annihilation. What Palestinian cultural studies scholars are doing, then, is keeping a record – for those who will want to hear and see it – of creative expression and life under political conditions that would normally result in a peoples’ erasure. Palestinian cultural and media studies The situation for us [Palestinians], since 1948, has been heavily political, in the sense that our self-expression as a people has been blocked. So since every poet in a way answers to the political and historical needs of the time in some way [ ... ] there is an implicit relationship to the political, even in the most nonpolitical of all forms, a relation of negativity. Edward Said, Culture and Resistance, 2003: 163–164 Countless cultural forms have been deemed emblematic of ‘true’ Palestinian culture: the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish; the literature of Ghassan Kanafani; the cartoons of Naji Al-Ali; folksongs, like We’hn ‘A Ram’Allah; the dabke dance; styles of embroidery (tatrizz); the kuffiyah; particular forms of stone architecture. Many of these have been co-opted by nationalist discourses or movements. For example, Naji Al-Ali’s child-witness, Handhala, is an icon of Palestinian nationalism and an unofficial mascot for socialist-leaning parties; Handhala paraphernalia is ubiquitous across Palestinian communities (in the Territories and beyond), as are the flag, The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 145 pictures of the Dome of the Rock, or maps of ‘all’ of Palestine. Of course, to suggest that there is ‘true’ Palestinian culture brings up numerous problems. First, it begs the questions: what are Palestine and Palestinians? These become highly complex and de-territorialised following the events of 1948, when the majority of Palestinians no longer reside on Palestinian land and subsequent generations continue to label themselves Palestinians, yet hold no citizenship, nor are they permitted to return to the homeland. Second, it pre-supposes that all cultures are homogeneous, static, and not influenced by any ‘external’ processes, which is obviously not the case. My purpose here is not to describe Palestinian culture or cultural forms, but to focus on scholarship that does. My objective is to map Palestinian cultural studies by highlighting scholarship on Palestinian culture and media. I focus primarily on the period since the early 1990s, because Palestinians in the Territories have only had the ‘freedom’ to create media since then. I include studies that focus on the Territories and/or are created by Palestinians who reside there. This is obviously problematic, for neither is the majority of Palestinians in the Territories, nor is the Palestinian condition so neatly geographically bound, but I limit myself for purposes of brevity and because the nation-state – on that particular piece of land – continues to be an important ideological-political and spatial form for Palestinians. By doing so, however, I am not suggesting that a national, spatially limited paradigm for understanding Palestinian culture is necessary, nor is it preferred. Finally, there are, of course, more scholars and a wider range than those I am including on cinema, music and broadcasting; I chose those below for they generally analyse and problematise the fact that ‘cultural production and resistance form an important component in the continuing struggle for Palestinian political rights’.26 Cinema Like the two other cultural forms I discuss, the development and study of cinema have paralleled political conditions. Cinema was prevented from developing within Palestine and emerged in exile, mostly after 1967. Films created in the 1960s and 1970s were usually produced under the auspices of political parties in exile, intended as instruments for the promotion of, or propaganda for, the national cause, the registering of revolutionary events and the depiction, most often, of life in refugee camps. In its glaring connection to armed struggle, the slogan of the Palestinian Cinema Manifesto 146 Helga Tawil-Souri (published in Syria in 1968) of a camera in one hand and a gun in the other is indicative of film’s political purpose of national definition, recognition, and (armed) mobilisation. The films of this period had unremitting nationalist objectives and tone. As important as their content, is the fact that they ‘disappeared’ after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Beirut, where they were housed in an unofficial archive, and still today no one knows how or why these films were lost; what remained has since been gathered in the Dreams of a Nation archive.27 Palestinian-Israeli filmmakers emerged in the 1980s, usually trained and living in Europe, marking the arrival of contemporary Palestinian cinema. Michel Khleifi brought about an aesthetic language of cinema, still firmly tied to a political project of searching for and asserting Palestinian identity, by way of folklore, memory and attachment to land. Khleifi was joined by feature filmmakers, such as Rashid Masharawi (a refugee from Gaza), Elia Suleiman (from Nazareth) and Hany Abu-Assad (in Europe), and documentary filmmakers, such as Mai Masri (mostly working out of Lebanon), Sobhi al-Zobaidi (a refugee in the West Bank), and Annemarie Jacir (out of the USA).28 While the films of the 1980s and 1990s often projected a unified image of Palestine that superseded internal conflicts and problems, echoing the often-heard mantra among Palestinian politicians (even today) of ‘getting rid of occupation first, then fixing internal problems’, more recent films have attempted to break away from an over-riding nationalist project of unification. They are still, however, all political, and they incorporate a gamut of conditions, expressions and concerns, from checkpoints and suicide bombings, to refugees and disappeared villages inside Israel. Arguably, it is the analysis of Palestinian cinema that has garnered the most and earliest attention among scholars interested in culture.29 Hamid Dabashi’s edited volume (2006) is the best collection of essays on Palestinian cinema to date. Contributors – scholars, filmmakers, and collectors – explain and problematise cinema’s relationship to the political across historical periods. Other scholars delineate Palestinian cinema’s different themes and forms, and situate Palestinian film-making along cinematic movements, such as nationalist, third worldist or exilic cinema;30 or analyse how ‘national affiliations and international awareness affect film production in a society dominated by national conflict’.31 Livia Alexander focuses on two dominant trends in cinema: the motif of land, and the more The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 147 geographically loose films on individuals and their liberation. Similarly, I have argued that: Palestinian filmmakers are only slowly inching beyond thinking of film as a political project – whether of embracing national unity of challenging it. Of course this may have to do with the fact that one could equally think of Palestinianness as still having to do with a political project: Palestine is simultaneously a nation coming into being and a nation being lost to exile, and its films represent both these contradictory aspects.32 More recently, Bresheeth argues that contemporary Palestinian films point to a continuity of pain and trauma and a continuity of struggle since 1948. As such, Palestinian films ‘offer a voice to the unsung and unheard continuing tragedy of Palestine, constructing a possible space for national and individual existence and identity today. In telling the story of Palestine, they counter the enormously powerful narrative of Zionism that occupied centre stage for most of the second half of the twentieth century’.33 In his typological observations, Bersheeth shows how Palestinian cinema deals with the story of Palestine as a strategic defence move designed to recapture ground lost to Zionism and its dominant narrative. All scholars recognise Palestinian cinema’s connection to the political and why the connection is imperative. Dabashi suggests that Palestinian cinema shares ‘the paramount feature [of] a subdued anger, a perturbed pride, a sublated violence. What ultimately defines what we may call a Palestinian cinema is the mutation of that repressed anger into an aestheticised violence – the aesthetic presence of a political absence. The Palestinians’ is an aesthetic under duress’.34 In Palestinian films, the duress of erasure and eradication is multi-layered: that of the nation/country, that of the locale (a village or town), that of the family, and that of the individual, ‘hence the dispossession brought about by conquest is even deeper and more painful that just losing home and country. The ultimate loss is that of one’s story, losing the right to tell one’s own story and history’.35 As such, some scholars argue that: ‘Palestinian film-making will continue to be a description of a continuous human tragedy [ ... ] Palestinian documentation is an explanation of loss, necessarily political. A chagrin for lost earth and lost lives, a lost future’.36 Palestinian cinematic production is more complicated than simply a lament for what has been lost; it is also, especially in its documentary 148 Helga Tawil-Souri form, a project of certification and the certifying a past history, ‘a form of visual “J’accuse” ’, and a sustained record of an endangered memory in the absence of a state.37 It is necessarily a response to the Zionist attempt to silence Palestinians. Bresheeth explains: The narratives of Zionism, annulling Palestine, denying its oppression by Israel, and telling the one-sided story of Zionism as a liberation movement, decimated the space for Palestinian cultural work after decimating the physical space that was Palestine. First it conquered and subdued the physical space. Then it renamed and reassigned it, thus erasing its past, its history, its story. Fighting the injustice of such narratives has to take place in the cultural arena – not as a replacement for the arena of the physical, but as its compliment.38 On a personal level, Palestinian filmmakers are transforming memoirs into evidence. On a collective level, they challenge the hegemonic Zionist/Israeli account of history and ongoing experiences of the Nakba, as well as other forms of hegemonic narratives that have largely left the Palestinian invisible, silent or misunderstood. The cinematic project is also about countering the ‘invisibility’ and stereotypes of ‘the Arab’ in Western and Israeli films, thus serving as a complex corrective measure against different discourses of erasure. Filmmaker Sobhi al-Zobaidi (2009) explains that the object of Palestinian cinema is to loosen images’ connections to the cultural and ideological assumptions that lie behind that cinema’s production and intended consumption/ reception, so that it can be re-produced, re-negotiated, and can allow for an alternative reading. This multifold strategy is not the case only with cinema. Music Palestinians have a long history of musical expression and performance, and more recently production. Unfortunately, this remains an under-studied area. With the exception of Joseph Massad’s 2005 essay, there exists no ‘major academic engagement with the overall history and the role of patriotic, nationalist, or revolutionary songs in the modern Arab world [ ... ] nor with their role in the Palestine tragedy specifically’.39 This is beginning to change with the emergence of Palestinian rappers who have garnered scholarly interest. Palestinian youth began experimenting with rap and hip-hop in the late 1990s, marked by the emergence of two Palestinian bands inside The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 149 Israel: DAM (Da Arabian MCs) from Lod, and MWR from Acre. Both groups began rapping about Israeli discrimination against Palestinians, and widened their repertoire to a range of ‘angry’ political expressions: from being slighted by Arab nations to addressing internal social problems, such as drug-use and misogyny. Rap has gained popularity across the West Bank, the Gaza Strip, and diasporic communities ‘fuelled in part by internet sites where groups can upload songs, and chat in forums devoted to Palestinian and Arabic rap’.40 There are now countless Palestinian hiphop groups. Hip-hop has become the ‘Palestinian Al Jazeera’ (echoing Chuck D of Public Enemy, who labelled hip-hop ‘the Black CNN’).41 It has become a tool for sharing news of social and political realities, as well as a tool for political critique and mobilisation. Scholars have taken interest in this ‘new’ form of cultural/political expression. Maira (2008) traces the underlying politics of Palestinian and Palestinian-American rap, situating it as a poetics of displacement and protest. Charles Kurzman claims ‘DAM’s moral blindness is a weapon of the weak. Like suicide [bombing], DAM’s radicalism is also a self-eradicating art – in a cultural rather than a physical sense’.42 This is debatable, since DAM is credited with starting, popularising and influencing Palestinian rap. DAM’s lyrics evoke anger, hatred and dispossession, but it is the Palestinian ‘structure of feeling’ that DAM is expressing and responding to (and arguably instigating further). As Massad argues, DAM’s songs ‘address not only the horrors of Israeli colonial racism, but also the disunity of the Palestinian population within’.43 DAM’s lyrics have become more sophisticated over the years. With that maturity, scholars have moved beyond simply complaining about Palestinian rap’s violent discourse, and the overwhelming focus on DAM itself. For example, Ela Greenberg (2009) writes about a lesser-known hip-hop outfit from Shu’afat refugee camp, on the outskirts of Jerusalem, and argues that rap is becoming a space of non-violent resistance against the emasculation that is a consequence of Israeli occupation and racism. Massad situates rap in a longer tradition of revolutionary and underground Arab political songs since the 1950s, many of which supported Palestinian liberation, mixing nationalist poetry with hybrid Arab-Western musical instrumentation. Massad traces how songs came to be inserted into the political field of nationalism, and how the history of songs parallels the history of the Palestinian struggle: the support of liberation in the 1950s, support for pan-Arabism and Nasserism in the 1960s, the despair 150 Helga Tawil-Souri and defeat of guerrilla movements post-1967, the loss of Jerusalem, etc. The way in which cinema tracked political changes in the Palestinian landscape was also echoed in music. Songs reflected popular sentiments and generated such sentiments, making the political internal to culture, ‘not epiphenomenal or subservient to the political, but [ ... ] generative of political sentiment’.44 For example, 1970s songs often named and mapped lost villages, expressing nostalgia and functioning to continue the presence of specific geographies, thus playing a role in political resistance. There is no doubt that Palestinian music, and contemporary rap especially, is imbued with politics, and functions as a cultural tool of political expression. Not surprisingly, some rappers have found the expectation that they be nationalistic stifling, at odds with their desire to be ‘purely’ artistic. Maira quotes one rapper who expresses this frustration: ‘sometimes I feel selfish but it’s not always about Palestine ... It doesn’t make you feel like an artist, singing the same thing’.45 She explains that ‘there is no inherent contradiction between art and politics, but there is a tension that has long been experienced by committed artists who are part of the global movement of Palestinian resistance art [ ... ] while continuing to use literature, music, film, visual art, and multimedia technology for “the cause” ’.46 This demonstrates a core tension in Palestinian cultural expression and the study thereof: is there a way to divorce this from the political? Is there a need to? It also shows the difference, albeit in the diaspora, of what Will Youmans (himself a rapper) calls Arab American hip hop versus Arab Americans in hip-hop, where the first incorporates Arab identity into its music, while the other identifies only with the broader category of hip-hop.47 In the study of Palestinian rap, we see how cultural forms have strenuous relationships with the political. On the one hand, rap is a form of resistance; on the other, its political (over)tone may be what stifles it. The advent of rap complicates both Palestinian culture and its study on at least another level: it is by definition hybrid, open to outside influences, even if it is also co-opted as a ‘hyper’ nationalist form of expression. Here, the tension between expressing Palestinianness and being open to external cultural influences disappears. Broadcasting Broadcast media within the Territories was only permitted after the Oslo Accords in the early 1990s. Through television and radio, ‘for the first time, [Palestinians could] speak for themselves and represent themselves, [gaining] The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 151 the ‘legitimacy’ of doing so within a public space without sanction of any kind’.48 Against the hegemonic global order in which they had been silenced or, at best, (mis)represented by others, the allowance of broadcasting allowed for a space in which Palestinians could have self-expression. As Lena Jayyusi argues, ‘the electronic media suggested the possibility of Palestinian selfproduction, and self constitution. Through them, a Palestinian world could be depicted, transmitted and rebuilt’.49 Like music, broadcasting remains an under-studied area of Palestinian media studies. Jayyusi’s work questions the extent to which broadcasting functions as a public sphere50 and to what extent the discourse of and within the media and, in Jayyusi’s research, specifically the PA-run radio station Voice of Palestine, ‘is embedded in, and productive of, an organisation of institutional and state directed objectives and concerns’.51 Jayyusi shows how the creation of radio was connected to both processes of nation-building and state-building and the contradictions at the heart of media discourses and the Oslo Accords themselves. My work looks at the impact of the Accords on the realm of policy and television specifically, which resulted in the proliferation of dozens of private, quasiillegal channels across the West Bank.52 I argue that by illegally rebroadcasting satellite channels and being limited by Israel in their use of airwaves, Palestinian television channels are both globalised and forcefully localised. The broadcast media emerged during the period of the formation and power consolidation of the PA, roughly from 1994 to 2003. Jamal (2004) argues that clear structural pluralism existed in the realm of television – in the dozens of channels for example. I suggest that this was a ‘tolerated plurality – officially illegal but permissible [ ... ] an indication of the PA’s political strategy to “divide and control” the population’.53 The landscape changed when, in 2005, Hamas launched its own television channel, which scholars such as Salama (2005) and Warshel (2008) focus on; the first describes the rise of the channel; the second situates its relative lack of popularity among Palestinian audiences. Scholars have yet to look at the production aspects of broadcasting (see Bishara 2006, for an ethnography of Palestinian cameramen who work for foreign news organisations), or conduct ethnographic audience studies. Amal Jamal’s work remains the most comprehensive in covering a range of issues from PA censorship (and internal censorship by media professionals) to representations of women. Jamal’s works critiques how ‘the communication order in Palestine serves not only as a means of control, but also as a field of contention between different political agents’.54 152 Helga Tawil-Souri He also analyses how, despite the growth of women’s efforts and movements, Palestinian media continue to hold a conservative view of gender issues.55 Although a nascent object of study, this scholarship does not simply point a finger at Israel, but looks at the various levels of obstructions and opportunities within the Palestinian media field. The kinds of hermeneutics, practices and theories that are addressed collectively in the scholarship described above point to the beginnings of a Palestinian cultural studies. Collectively, this work is important, both politically and otherwise, for the Palestinian ‘nation’. First, they demonstrate that the political is not simply what takes place in the realm of governments or legal agreements, but in the practice of everyday life and, as such, justify future studies on that ‘thing’ deemed less important than politics: culture. Second, they demonstrate how the Nakba continues to shape Palestinian life and cultural production, compounded by subsequent political events. Third, their contribution is in putting the political back in culture and cultural studies. Finally, they serve as bulwarks against historical erasure, an intellectual means of resistance that is not just in the realm of the abstract but has very real consequences. Reclaiming history, re-shaping the future Don’t grab a gun but grab a pen and write from the song Ng’ayer Bukra (Change Tomorrow) DAM, 2006 The Palestinian cultural struggle is not only the ‘commemoration’ of the Nakba, but also the desire to be visible, to be heard, and to be documented. In their cultural praxis Palestinians preserve the(ir) past and reproduce its images and its discourse, and simultaneously represent and recreate the present, whether in exile, in refugee camps, in ghettos or open-air prisons. Given the political necessity of this cultural praxis, the project of Palestinian cultural studies is itself a mode of consciousness reclaiming history, dismantling the mythic Zionist/Israeli narrative. This becomes the task – conscious or not, explicit or not – of scholars such as those above. As Edward Said eloquently puts it: One of the roles of the intellectual at this point is to provide a counterpoint, by storytelling, by reminders of the graphic nature of suffering, and by reminding everyone that we’re The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 153 talking about people. We’re not talking about abstractions [ ... ] One has to keep telling the [Palestinian] story in as many ways as possible, as insistently as possible, and in as compelling a way as possible, to keep attention to it, because there is always a fear that it might just disappear.56 Resistance is at the heart of Palestinian cultural studies, ascertaining that Palestinians are not silenced, not erased, not ‘disappeared’. This ‘responsibility’ on the part of scholars is reminiscent of Gramsci’s ‘war of position’, which involves social organisation and the development of cultural predominance. The war of position is intellectual, focused on the cultural realm in which anti-capitalist politicians seek to gain the dominant voice in the mass media and across civil society. Once achieved, this position can be used to amplify class-consciousness, teach revolutionary theory and inspire revolutionary organisation. Winning the war, communist leaders would then have the necessary political power and popular support to begin the armed insurrection against capitalism – the war of manoeuvre. The same is true here (and depending on one’s ideological leanings, one could choose to replace the words capitalist and communist with, or simply add them to, Zionist/Israeli and Palestinian). In Gramsci’s words, ‘a human mass does not “distinguish” itself, does not become independent in its own right without, in the widest sense, organising itself: and there is no organisation without intellectuals [ ... ] But the process of creating intellectuals is long and difficult, full of contradictions, advances and retreats, dispersal and regrouping’.57 The quest and contribution of cultural and media ‘intellectuals’ is a long struggle of laying the groundwork for a ‘larger’ insurrection: to reclaim the past and reshape the future. There is, of course, an inherent tension within Palestinian cultural studies and it is the predicament of the political. On the one hand, it continues to be hostage to the political conditions of the culture is it studying; on the other, the political is an order it is trying to negate. Cultural producers and scholars recognise this, and have expressed the tension in various ways. Straightforwardly, Said beckons: ‘we have to go beyond survival to the battle of culture and information’.58 The rapper who feels stifled by nationalist responsibility is expressing the same sentiment. DAM suggests something similar in the lyrics above in that, for Palestinians, the battle is not in armed struggle, but on an intellectual/cultural level. Elia Suleiman explains this in terms not at all unique to film: ‘there is still some work to be done about 154 Helga Tawil-Souri “dismantling the flag”. I am trying to deconstruct this imposed national image, this image constructed by all these cultural actors who are always droning on about what Palestine means to them and who seem to fear that if this image disappears their artistic inspiration will disappear with it’.59 Finally, the same can be said of culture more broadly, and of Palestinian cultural studies as Massad hopes for cinema: ‘that Palestinian cinema will not only remain a weapon of resistance but that it will also become a weapon and an act of culture’.60 However, the political conditions that would allow for this kind of ‘freedom’ are nowhere near happening. Tensions continue. Various forms of repression and silencing persist; and yet there is no denying the power of new forms of expression, their reach to wider audiences, and their potential for wider political change – in mediated platforms, whether in cinema, rap, television or the Internet. What sets Palestinian cultural studies apart is the coercion of the political back into cultural studies generally (and with that the overcoming of the division that has occurred in cultural studies over the past three decades, of negating the legacies of what the forefathers of cultural studies were seeking to achieve in the first place), and the preservation of a past that is reflective of a (hyper)modern condition of de-territorialisation, fragmentation and dispersal. These tensions are reflective of the Palestinian condition: neither an accepted discourse, narrative, history or nation-state, nor a willingness to be silenced and erased. The dialectic between art and politics continues, and nowhere is it more vibrant in the region than in the Palestinian context. To return to the photography exhibition at the Sakakini, of course, the photographs didn’t need to focus on the political reality of refugees; the photographer was pushing Palestinian culture out of its political box. Hers will continue to be a rare feat, one that can only come with privilege, distance, and a forceful divorcing of culture from the political. For the foreseeable future, however, this photographer is likely to remain anomalous. She is also likely to be forgotten in the annals of Palestinian culture. For the strength of Palestinian culture and cultural studies is precisely in merging the political with the cultural, doing so in a particular way and under particular conditions. The heritage, to date, of Palestinian culture and its study is the creation of a record of life under political hardship and against the constant threat of annihilation. Whether in responding to the theft of the archives in 1982, to dispossession of their land, to unremitting racism and apartheid, to repression at the hands of Arab regimes, to continued The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 155 conditions of exile, to chronic misrepresentations in the global media, Palestinians’ contributions to the world are necessarily political. The legacy that a Palestinian cultural studies will leave behind is the formidable task of national self-expression, self-representation and self-realisation under conditions continuously preventing them from actualisation. Until the political ‘problem’ of Palestinians is resolved, their culture, and their cultural studies will continue to be a culture of active resistance. Sa’di and Abu-Lughod write that ‘Palestinian memory is, by dint of its preservation and social production under the conditions of its silencing by the thundering story of Zionism, dissident memory, counter-memory. It contributes to a counter-history’.61 The way Palestinian memory is, at its core, political, so is Palestinian culture. Both Palestinian culture and Palestinian cultural studies are attempts to fight historical amnesia and create a more equitable future. Palestinian cultural studies, then, is a countercultural studies. The objective, as it stands today, of cultural praxis and cultural studies, is to ensure that Palestinians do not become footnotes in the longer cultural and political history of humanity. Notes Suleiman 2000: 101. Ibid: 99. Hall 1980, 63; original emphases. Williams 1961, 1977, 1983. Smith 1997: 59. See Peck 2001 for a genealogy and critique of this shift. See Garnham 1995 and Grossberg 1995. Of course the tensions have to do with Marxism, and thus rather than simply with the political, with the economic; or if one prefers, or with the ‘base’ which many cultural studies scholars, from the early 1980s onwards, were critiquing for being approached over-determinatively. While I am not addressing the economic here, I am arguing that the spatial-political conditions of Palestinians function similarly to the ‘base’ and do in many ways determine the ‘superstructure’ of the cultural realm. 9. Hammami and Tamari 1997: 275. 10. Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007. 11. In fact, Massad argues that the term Nakba – which has been translated, as catastrophe, cataclysm, or disaster – is rather inappropriate. Because Palestinians don’t just suffer from a historical event that has passed but are still reeling from it, Palestinians should be called mankubin, closer to meaning ‘catastrophe-d or disaster-ed people’ (Massad 2008). 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 156 Helga Tawil-Souri 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. Swedenburg 1989: 268. Piterberg 2001: 32. Bresheeth 2007: 165; original emphases. Ibid: 179. Said 2003: 20. See Thompson 1980; Hall 1980. First, the end of official occupation was really an end on the part of the Israeli government to be responsible for Palestinian life; Israel still remains in ultimate control. Second, I am not suggesting that with the ‘end’ of occupation this policy is actually over; if anything, it has become more forceful and widespread through different forms since 1991. Third, I am not denying the strength of silencing under the control of the Jordanian and Egyptian regimes in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, respectively, between 1948 and 1967; nor on behalf of Arab governments such as Lebanon and Saudi Arabia, or the larger international community throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. See Jayyusi 2002. See Abdelhadi 2004 for the impact on a Nablus-based radio station. I do not want to make it my object here to delineate all the ways in which Palestinians are silenced and erased; examples are countless, whether in the shape of their territorial exile or the dominance of the pro-Israeli lobby in the West. See Bishara 2008 for an example in the realm of international news. A number of problems arise with the arrival of the PA and the corruption and nepotism manifested in the cultural realm; these are beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I only want to bring attention to the PA’s attempts – however feeble and problematic – to assert a Palestinian voice (for critiques of PA censorship, control and relationship to media see Jamal 2001, 2005; Tawil-Souri, 2007; Nossek, H. and K. Rinnawi (2003) ‘Censorship and Freedom of the Press Under Changing Political Regimes: Palestinian Media from Israeli Occupation to the Palestinian Authority’. Gazette 65.2: 183–202. Said 2003: 163–64. Here it is apt to bring in a common term from the Palestinian context, that of sumud (steadfastness), which has been the foundational ideological justification, political strategy and everyday experience at the heart of the Palestinian struggle beginning with the first intifada. See the 2009 special issue of Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2.2 and my editorial in it, Tawil-Souri, H. ‘Towards a Palestinian Cultural Studies’, 181–85. Davis: 4. There are studies of Palestinian cultural forms that pre-date the ‘peace years’ (1991 onwards), that focus on the First Intifada (1987–91), on the period of formal Israeli occupation (1967–91), on the decades between 1948 and 1967, on the British Mandate period (pre-1948); the majority of 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 157 these were conducted within more ‘traditional’ fields such as history, sociology and political science. There also exists a history of attempting to develop village social histories and compiling different aspects of folk culture – proverbs, folk tales, folk medicine, child-rearing practices, superstitions, and aspects of peasant technology and material culture – based ‘on collecting and categorising folk artefacts as exemplars of an unchanging national character, with little or no treatment accorded to the social dynamics of change [ ... and suffering from a general] absence of critical frameworks identifying internal contradictions and historicity’ (Hammami and Tamari 1997, 277). Finally, there is scholarship that could be incorporated into the fold of cultural studies focused on the Palestinian Territories that I have chosen to omit: Peteet’s analysis of graffiti (Peteet, J. (1996) ‘The Writing on the Walls: The Graffiti of the Intifada’. Cultural Anthropology 11.2: 139–59); work on the material culture of architecture (Al-Ju’beh, N. (2009) ‘Architecture as a Source for Historical Documentation: The Use of Palestine’s Built Heritage as a Research Tool’. Jerusalem Quarterly 36: 48–65); Feldman’s research on ‘visibility practices’ as manifested in different kinds of objects such as keys, ID cards and modes of discourse (Feldman, I. (2008) ‘Refusing Invisibility: Documentation and Memorialization in Palestinian Refugee Claims’. Journal of Refugee Studies 21.4: 498–516); Yaqub’s essay on political cartoons (Yaqub, N. (2009) ‘Gendering the Palestinian Political Cartoon’. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 2.2: 187–213); and a recently growing body of work on the role of the Internet and digital media in the political: Tawil-Souri, H. (2007) ‘Move Over Bangalore. Here Comes ... Palestine? Western Funding and “Internet Development” in the Shrinking Palestinian State’ in P. Chakravartty and Y. Zhao (eds) Global Communications: Toward a Transcultural Political Economy. Boulder: Rowman & Littlefield: 263–284; Tawil-Souri, H. (2007) ‘The Political Battlefield of Pro-Arab Video Games on Palestinian Screens’. Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27.3: 536–51; Aouragh, M. (2008) ‘Everyday Resistance on the Internet: The Palestinian Context’. Journal of Arab and Muslim Media Research 1.2: 109–30. 27. See Dabashi 2006. 28. All of these filmmakers produce both feature and documentary films, I am classifying them here according to what they are most well-known for. 29. Studies exist on facets on Palestinian culture that have preceded that on film, particularly news, literature and theatre. Scholarship on Palestinian literature and theatre is substantive. These fall outside the purview of the kind of cultural studies I am focusing on here – as my interest is on the more explicitly mediated. Rashid Khalidi’s study on Palestinian nationalism includes a good analysis on early newspapers and their connection to political consciousness and identity formation (Khalidi, R. (1998) Palestinian Identity: The Construction of Modern National Consciousness, New York: Columbia University Press). More recent studies on news, news-gathering and news-production have been 158 Helga Tawil-Souri rather narrow in their scope: focusing either on various forms of censorship by Israel, and later by the PA (see Nossek, H. and K. Rinnawi, 2003; op.cit), or on ethnocentrism and violence that emerge in news coverage (Wolsfeld, G., P. Frosh, and M. Awadby (2008) ‘Covering Death in Conflicts: Coverage of the Second Intifada on Israeli and Palestinian Television’. Journal of Peace Research 45.3: 401–17). Naficy 2001; Tawil 2005. Alexander 2005: 151. Tawil 2005, 137. Bresheeth 2007: 165–66. Dabashi 2006: 11. Bresheeth 2007, 180. Tawil 2005: 137. Dabashi 2006: 12. Bresheeth 2007: 178–79. Massad 2005: 176. Greenberg 2009: 232. Maira 2008: 162. Kurzman 2005: 72. Massad 2005: 193. Ibid: 177. Maria 2008: 184. Ibid; emphasis added. Youmans 2007: 45. Jayyusi 1998: 190. Ibid: 191. See also Jamal 2001, 2005. Jayyusi 1998: 193. Tawil-Souri 2007. Ibid: 11. Jamal 2005: 2. Jamal 2005: 107–138; Jamal, 2004. Said 2003: 187. Gramsci 1971: 334. Said 2003, 81; emphasis added. Suleiman 2000: 99. Massad 2006: 44; original emphases. Sa’di and Abu-Lughod 2007: 6. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. Bibliography Abdelhadi, Amer (2004) ‘Surviving Siege, Closure, and Curfew: The Story of a Radio Station’, Journal of Palestine Studies 34.1: 51–67. The Necessary Politics of Palestinian Cultural Studies 159 Alexander, Livia (2005) ‘Is There a Palestinian Cinema? The National and Transnational in Palestinian Film Production’ in R. Stein and T. 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