Culture, Revolution and Memorializing Violence in the Middle East
Panel VIII-13, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 8 at 01:30 pm
Panel Description
Revolutionaries across the Middle East have produced and used culture as a significant site of struggle and a central space for revolutionary politics (Ashour 2018; Harlow 1987; Kanafani 1968; Fanon 1963). Revolutionary culture constitutes a crucial aspect of what Gramsci has called "counter-hegemonic ideological position", part of a revolutionary reclamation of the terms of knowledge. In the Middle East creating revolutionary culture in the the context of colonialism, imperialism, apartheid, occupation, and fundamentalism has been an essential weapon in opposition to dominant structures of power, mobilizing the masses, and claiming the right to narrate histories while simultaneously memoralize state violence.
In recent decades, a growing body of scholarship has attended to the ways that we remember and memorialize our collective pasts, particularly those inscribed with political violence and social injustice. Feminist scholars in particular have illuminated how remembrance and memorialization practices are spaces of contestation over racially gendered histories, ideologies, subjectivities and imaginaries. This literature has called attention to the exclusionary and hegemonizing tendencies of traditional memorials, while also accounting for remembrance and memorialization through storytelling, oral histories, filmmaking, testimonies, photography, poetry, performance, artistic productions, rituals, ceremony, monuments, and archives, etc. as dynamic spaces through which communities affected by political violence resist, mobilize and enact agency (Sadi & Abu-Lughod 2007; Abdo & Masalha 2017; Ford-Smith 2014; Gómez-Barris 2009, 2016; Robson 2017; Rocu & Salem 2019; Slymovics 2013; Suarez & Suarez 2016; Taylor 2003 ). Although there exist a number of studies of remembrance and memorialization initiatives in the aftermath and afterlife of political violence, rarely are there investigations that center memoraliziation practices of revolutions or produced by revolutionaries, particularly in the context of the Middle East. As well, there are few studies that center analyses of the social relations of race, class, gender, Indigeneity in theorizing how the production of revolutionary culture and memoralization practices are formulated within and move through complex transnational flows and circuits.
This panel will explore the relationship between culture, revolution and memoralization in the Middle East with a specific focus on Palestine and Kurdistan. The panel will offer insight into thinking regionally and transnationally about the remembrance and memorialization of racially, gendered colonial, imperial, militarized state violence. The panelists will methodologically draw from oral histories, memoirs and memories of revolutionaries in the region, to theorize memoralization and state violence. The panel will also explore the political significance of rememberance and memoralization for the present.
Disciplines
Education
Geography
Sociology
Participants
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Dr. Susan Benson-Sokmen
-- Presenter
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Chandni Desai
-- Organizer, Presenter, Chair
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Prof. Shahrzad Mojab
-- Presenter
Presentations
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Chandni Desai
The Israeli settler colonial state has systematically targeted, attacked and attempted to destroy Palestinian culture as a means of eliminating Palestinian life, material culture, memory and history. Nevertheless, Palestinians specifically revolutionaries produced various cultural institutions and radical art forms as a way to preserve the Palestinian narrative, history, collective memory, memoralize violence and oppose colonial and imperialist histiography. Helga Tawil Souri has argued, there is a substantial amount of scholarship on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and issues relating to them; but a focus on culture has largely been secondary. The scholarly literature that does exist tends to analyze Palestinian poetry and literature for their meanings of home, belonging, displacement and exile. However, very little research exists on the role revolutionary cultural producers have played in the Palestinian liberation struggle. Drawing from oral history interviews/testimonies I conducted with Palestinian revolutionary cultural producers (that were part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization) and an analysis of their artistic productions (visual art, films, poetry), this paper explores how these figures memorialized violence and resistance, and articulated the significance of cultural production during the revolution. I argue that these revolutionary cultural workers produced a resistance consciousness which they circulated transnationally through various networks and circuits they established, which enabled the mobilization of cadres for the revolution and global support for the Palestinian liberation struggle.
In cultural studies treatment of settler colonialism has largely remained undertheorized in the field. As such this paper theoretically contributes to analyzing Zionist settler colonialism and its reliance on Indigenous erasure -Palestinian life and culture. Using Indigenous studies and decolonizing frameworks, this research also contributes to theorizing memory and resistance through Palestinian epistemologies and ontology – Indigenous knowledge.
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Figures of Dissent: Women Memoirs of Defiance
In recent years, a new scholarship on the Middle East and the Arab World is emerging which employs Marxist analysis to explicate the history of class struggle and the violence of colonialism, neoliberal capitalism and imperialism in the region. This literature addresses, challenges, as well as theoretically and historically confronts some key concerns/questions/notions such as ‘Arab (re)awaking’, ‘absence of democratic practices’, ‘revolutionary subjects’, ‘the fetish of youth and their dream of democracy’, and ‘digital revolution’, among others. The literature is a departure from both orientalist as well as post-colonial and post-structuralist traditions and instead is reintroducing a historical analysis of people’s struggle for justice and democracy in the region in the context of colonial encounter, occupation of Palestine, brutal suppression of national minorities such as the Kurds, the rise of capitalism and in recent decades the imperialist wars of destruction and total decomposition of self, society, and social in the region.
On the basis of this theoretical and historical framework, this chapter reads through a selected memoir to enliven the figures of dissent in the long history of women’s resistance movements in the Middle East. The memoirs are selected to address a wide range of struggles against nationalism, patriarchy, theocracy, and imperialism. They represent the defiance of one woman who speaks to a collective dream, desire, fear but also hope of a generation. The memoirs narrate the life history of a revolutionary Kurdish woman (Sara: My whole life was a struggle); the anguish of a father whose daughters were executed in Iran (Aziz’s notebook: Transmitting the memory of violence); and describe the life of two Iranian revolutionary sisters engaged in anti-imperialist resistance movement in Oman (Omani Revolutionaries: The Dhofar War Diary). The texts narrate three stories with spatial and temporal proximities; they all are taking place in the two decades of 1970s-1980s in Iran, Oman, and Turkey. These memoirs and remembering/witnessing texts are also the forgotten ones. The authors took notes in silence and secret in fear of further persecution that they were speaking of. The texts remained hidden for decades and are still not read widely. This paper is an attempt to remember revolutionary figures of dissent through their act of defiance and remembering.
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Dr. Susan Benson-Sokmen
When I was visiting relatives in Turkey during the Çözüm Süreci (“Peace Solution”) in 2014, a friend suggested that I also visit one of the newly established “guerrilla” courts on Tendürek Mountain. Over the summer, while government and opposition officials met in Ankara to negotiate the end of the thirty-year conflict between the Turkish State and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), Kurds from Dogubayazit, not waiting for the guerrillas to officially “come down from the mountain” (i.e. the end of the armed struggle), traveled to the mountain to resolve disputes with relatives, neighbours, and business partners. I asked the male fighter filling my tea glass how he thought the party’s feminist ideology would change once it also “came down from the mountain” and had to confront the “lived reality” of patriarchy. “It won’t,” he answered. “Kurdish society will have to change.” When I later described his response as "naïve" to my friend, she suggested that my skepticism had prevented me from seeing the “different trajectories of possibility” of feminist resistance in Kurdistan (Cooper 2005). She pointed out that even Cynthia Enloe, who believes that, like the nation-state, anti-colonial movements establish sovereignty by re-establishing patriarchy, felt that it was “worth imagining” the impact and possibilities of national liberation movements “informed by women’s oppression” (1989).
This paper adds to the scholarship on the role of Kurdish women in the liberation of Kurdistan by arguing that it is not only “worth imagining” the impact of anti-colonial resistance on Kurdish women but also on ideas of masculinity. The focus on women has limited the feminist imagination of Kurdish resistance, occluding how models of Kurdish femininity (the martyr, the guerrilla) and the roles of Kurdish women (protestor, politician, fighter) have led to re-configurations and re-inscriptions of masculinity in Kurdistan and the Turkish state.
The paper begins by examining forms of artistic expression that “animate masculinity” (Amar 2011) in Kurdish resistance, using the celebration and mourning of Kurdish martyrs in Kurdish popular culture to reveal the “emergent” (Inhorn 2019) revolutionary masculinities that challenge the ethnic and gendered boundaries of the nation-state. The paper then goes onto to expose the erasure of their accompanying “insurgent” femininities, tracing the “flashing up” up Kurdish women in Turkish novels, films, and television shows. It concludes that hegemonic masculinity in Turkey is both defined and redefined in contradistinction to the “overly-liberated” Kurdish women.
