In this paper, I ask, what is the decolonial potential that artists have identified in varied representations of Palestinian mobility and public transportation? How do their imaginative interpretations function as new optics for recognizing the often-overlooked political relevance of quotidian practices? To frame the presentation, I first briefly interrogate the historical relationship between mobility and freedom in Palestine, the ways that movement can both effect dispossession and displacement but also can allow the reconnection of fragmented communities. Elsewhere, I have argued that mobility is a central modality through which Israel exercises control over Palestinian life, yet simultaneously has become a means of Palestinian resistance against Israeli settler colonialism. In this talk, I draw from my previous work to outline the conditions of Palestinian mobility and the stakes of its role in the Palestinian struggle as a way to set up the analysis of the artistic works that follows. In the rest of the paper, I consider artists’ renderings of the roles that freedom of movement might play in decolonizing the Palestinian homeland. To do so, I rely on the work of Palestine-based artists who feature imaginative engagements with mobility and transit to think through the effects of freedom of movement on self-determination and sociality. The projects I examine include Larissa Sansour’s futuristic digital collection, “The Nation (E)state” (2012); Mohammed Abusal’s installation and photography project, “The Gaza Metro” (2011); Decolonizing Architecture Art Residency (DAAR)’s “Ottoman Railway” (2012); and Tahani Rached’s film, Soraida: A Woman of Palestine (2004) as interpreted by Jane Frere’s sculpture “Return of the Soul: The Nakba Project” (2010). Each of these projects advances different visions for the ways that unfettered mobility can not only realize but in fact redefine the internationally recognized Palestinian right of return as a dynamic process of connecting old and new sites of freedom.

In Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948-1968, Ghassan Kanafani was among the first to examine the fraught relationship between contemporary Palestinian history and both the content and form of its literature. My research continues this project by focusing on the Palestinian novel and its recent transmutations. The Arabic novel is a relatively recent phenomenon, born into the realist tradition and imported from the West in the early-twentieth century. That the Palestinian novel has assumed a historical function is not surprising. The novel form was, after all, the product not only of socio-cultural circumstance, but developed in Europe out of historical narrative itself. Therefore, while the tangled relationship between history and the novel is in no way unique to Palestine, the Palestinian engagement of literature as a means of countering a predominantly Western historical narrative - rooted in an ideological and national project dependent upon the erasure of Palestinian history itself - deserves critical analysis The Palestinian author’s preoccupation with history has been a foregone conclusion since 1948. While this history has weighed heavily on Palestinian writers, the nature of this relationship is beginning to change in the post-Oslo era. One cause for this shift may be located in the establishment of the Palestinian Authority following the Oslo Accords. The legitimization of a state body allowed for limited research and archival activities, subsequently relieving authors in part of this responsibility and the perceived obligations both to and of the novel form. Furthermore, over the past two decades, the Palestinians’ ever more liminal existence has conversely become increasingly visible on the world stage via social media, alternate modes of publishing, and writing in English. These changes in the very modes of production have impacted the form of Palestinian writing in a departure from the novel. Works such as Mourid Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah (1997), Leila El-Haddad’s Gaza Mom (2010), and Atef Abu Saif’s The Drone Eats With Me avoid genre categorization. The authors move away from Edward Said’s assertion of the exilic status as a “fundamental condition of Palestinian life”- whose lynchpin is 1948 - towards an insistence upon the particularities of Palestinian existence and the rejection of reified notions of Palestinian experience, identity and history. In this paper, as such, I explore how contemporary Palestinian authors are moving beyond the historical novel, developing mediums capable of expressing Palestinian contemporaneity.

How do the transnational consequences of political trauma alter individual political subjectivity and perceptions of political agency? How can one continue to dream and hope if old dreams were consistently crushed, neglected, or disciplined? This paper will consider these questions by examining oral histories of refugees and political exiles from Iraq. Their narratives speak of three Iraqs. The first is the obvious geographic place that conditions their experiences, memories, dreams, and traumas. The other Iraq is the one of nostalgia and the stories of how it was before. The third is of “what if” and “if only.” It is the Iraq of dreams that were never realized. The desires that were forcibly pushed aside as physical violence forced the dreamers to hide their dreams and to send them away to far away places in their consciousness. This paper will present some of these dream narratives, and explore what the effect of repeated traumas have been on the ability or desire of the dreamers to continue to imagine political possibilities. Some have sworn off politics arguing that potential for political agency is highly constrained. Others continue to be politically active despite their experiences, and yet some are at the same time weary of political activism’s ability to make change but advocate political involvement. These narratives point to unresolved internal debate about the nature of power and politics. The paper identifies ways in which these narratives contain a level of “political depression” as defined by Ann Cvektovic, where political work does not seem to alter the world or empower those involved. Lastly the paper will ask about the political possibilities that can be opened up by excavating and conjuring up the old deferred dreams of the past in the current moment where possibilities for Iraq might seem very limited.

This paper amends scholarly accounts that describe activism in Iran’s revolutionary uprising in terms of pragmatism. These accounts argue that, between the Fall of 1977 and the late Summer of 1978, the language of activism and the actual experience of revolutionary mobilization in Iran were at odds with one another (Kurzman 2005). On these terms, we may rightly dispel causal explanations that attribute the revolt to cultural determinism. Yet these accounts go too far in positing a pragmatic sensibility devoid of cultural specificity. How did the constructed repertoires of resistance in revolutionary Iran -- or rather, the cultural practices produced in efforts to disrupt social and political order -- unintentionally allow for a pragmatic disposition on the part of the revolution’s non-activist mass? What can this observation teach us about social movements in our contemporary moment in general? I answer these question by reexamining the archive of activist efforts to incite revolt, from leftists in the late 1960s and early 1970s to liberals and Islamists in the year before the revolt became mass-based. I focus in particular on the history of mourning ceremonies or chihilum (fortieth-day mourning rites) as techniques of protest in contemporary Iran. Between 1968 and 1978, the language surrounding these events produced an unexpected basis of solidarity predicated on the convergence between conceptions of shah?dat and discourses of individual human rights. I call this form of solidarity auto-empathy. On these terms, the paper provides a cultural frame of reference that coheres with the indeterminate and open-ended pragmatism of actors on the ground prioritized in “anti-explanations.”