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From Homeplace to Community: Reconfiguring Sumud through Residential Graffiti in Palestine
Abstract
Significant scholarly attention has been paid to graffiti, murals, and resistance art on the apartheid wall in Palestine, and even in city centers and public streets. While the art in these public spaces offers us a lot in terms of politics and resistance, less has been written about the graffiti and art on the walls of resident homes. In this paper I argue that the graffiti and murals on the walls of resident homes, as well as the constant upkeep of them and documentation of the upkeep via social media, not only serve as a form of sumud (steadfastness), but also reconfigure common notions of sumud. Building on the work of scholars such as Craig Larkin, Julie Peteet, Jeyda Hammad, and Rachel Tribe–who have analyzed graffiti and resistance art in public spaces, and theorized forms of sumud and its many tensions– I instead focus my analysis on the art in/on the homeplace, as one that resists public/private binaries, thus theorizing a form of sumud that complicates common notions of it being covert, individual, “maintenance,” “coping,” or passive, instead coming to a more explicitly confrontational form of sumud that moves through both individuals and communities (drawing also on Christina Sharpe’s theory of wake work). Through my textual and visual analysis of social media posts by residents in neighborhoods like Sheikh Jarrah, I situate the residential graffiti and its constant upkeep (and its change over time) through community events as not only laying claim to the land itself, but also adding to the subversive value of the structures (drawing on bell hooks understanding of homeplace) through reconfiguring homeplace as simultaneously a refuge inside and outside, as the graffiti itself blurs lines of public/private and inner/outer. While many studies on graffiti and resistance art on the apartheid wall have begun to highlight a sense of hopelessness associated with such creative resistance as non-confrontational, residential graffiti and the act of documenting its upkeep offer us a more complicated narrative that depicts creative resistance as both a catalyst for confrontational resistance, and as something that also sustains tangible resistance– reconfiguring sumud to continue forging a path forward in the contemporary movement we are in today.
Discipline
Sociology
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None