In March of 1968, Israeli forces attacked militant fighters from the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) camped out in the Jordanian town of Karameh. Despite the ultimate destruction of the camp, the Jordanian Army provided vital assistance to the PLO and pushed the Israeli forces back. Subsequently, the PLO transformed this military defeat into a moral and political victory, one that proliferated in visual media and highlighted the cooperation between Palestinians and Jordanians. Emphasizing this solidarity, King Hussein of Jordan declared, “We are all fedayeen.” However, this sentiment would soon turn sour as tensions between the PLO and the Jordanians increased, leading to a total rupture of relations in 1970 with long-lasting effects. This paper seeks to recuperate that moment of Palestinian-Jordanian camaraderie by examining the representations of Karameh produced in the battle’s immediate wake. I contend that the new, revolutionary Palestinian image promoted by the PLO after 1967 was critically informed by a close, dynamic relationship with Jordanian cultural workers during these formative years. This paper will shed light on the unexamined circuits of artistic interaction between the PLO and Jordanian state and media apparati in order to challenge narratives that solely focus on the subsequent political conflict between the two parties, and instead offer an alternative analysis that allows us to rethink the power and potential of visual culture as a site for negotiation, solidarity, and possibility. In its move to reorient the public image of Palestinians from beseeching refugees to empowered fedayeen, the PLO heavily relied upon the deployment of documentary and journalistic tropes in its posters, illustrated pamphlets, and lens-based media. For example, three of the PLO’s Film and Photo Unit founding members—Mustafa Abu Ali, Sulafa Jadallah, and Hani Jawharia—all initially worked on productions for the Jordanian Ministry of Culture. This experience exerted a lasting stylistic impact demonstrated by similarities in film structure, narrative voice, and visual framing. More broadly, I argue that the PLO’s Arts and National Culture division incorporated elements of the official tone modeled by Jordanian cultural authorities in order to produce and promote a unified vision of an independent Palestinian national identity. This paper will fill in the institutional history of collaboration to support an aesthetic analysis of how the Battle of Karameh in particular came to hold such symbolic importance across national lines and stood as a rallying cry for fedayeen solidarity, brief though that moment may have been.

In the middle of the film When Monaliza Smiled (Fadi Haddad, 2012), the young couple at the center of the movie--the Palestinian woman Monaliza (Tahani Salim) and the Egyptian man Hamdi (Shady Khalaf)--sit in the traffic circle in the upscale Ammani neighborhood of Abdoun. Both are working class, trying to survive on meager government salaries amid steady inflation in Jordan. They survey the restaurants and cafés around them, each priced well beyond their means, and eventually lean against one another, as Monaliza asks, "Do you ever feel like a stranger in your own country?" It is a small moment in a film that presents itself as a light romantic comedy, but it strikingly foregrounds many of the struggles in contemporary Amman, from economic inequality to distribution of space and from divisions between national identity groups to the lives of migrant workers. This is not only demonstrated through the trials of a Palestinian-Egyptian relationship juxtaposed against the ethno-nationalism of a Jordanian government office, but also through the geographic arrangement of the scenes in the film, which explore the economic and cultural divides between East and West Amman. From bus rides through a variety of socioeconomic spaces that serve as dates to the alienation brought by entire neighborhoods of the city that most Ammanis cannot afford access to, the film attempts to chart the modern geographies and inequalities of Amman. When Monaliza Smiled rests at the intersection of the neoliberal reassembly of Jordanian space in the capital of Amman and the economic and political reconstruction of Jordanianness in a cosmopolitan capital where Palestinians, Jordanians, Egyptians, Armenians, and others must transverse competing economic, social, and geographic boundaries. Built on fieldwork mapping films in Jordan and their relationships to real world social spaces, this paper will explore the often overlooked realm of Jordanian cinema, its relationship to the social geography of Amman, and how it speaks to the challenges of life in a neoliberal authoritarian state.

This paper tracks the emergence of Amman as a concert destination. Bands like Autostrad, Jadal, and Morabba3 are fleshing out an independent Arab music scene that has for years been the exclusive province of Beirut. Since 2010, the material growth of Amman, an increase in festivals and festival attendance, and an increasingly cosmopolitan middle class have fueled the notion that Amman is catching up to the regional cultural hotspots of Beirut, Cairo, and Dubai, especially considering turmoil in Damascus and Baghdad. The Jordanian capital is emerging as an important destination for live music: especially alternative, independent bands. However, the enthusiasm for Amman’s stability and the role it has come to play as a host for cultural production in the wake of the violence and instability affecting traditional Arab cultural hubs needs complicating. I work to do so by elaborating how some prominent music festivals utilize and access public space, participating in a rigidly class-stratified regime of the city. Thick descriptions of concerts during the Al-Balad Music Festival and Word is Yours Festival in 2015 flesh out both the excitement and contradictions accompanying this growth in cultural production. Theoretically, this paper offers an analysis of listening as a public activity. In this, I diverge from literature accounting for the politics of public activity in Middle Eastern contexts (Bayat 2010; Khalili 2015). I argue that listening does not in and of itself enact public pleasure that others have argued can be liberating. I suggest that audiences gathering to listen to alternative concerts in Amman is not necessarily progressive – pretenses to free expression and progressive gender mixing, not withstanding. My research points instead to the alarming reification of class difference in Amman’s independent music industry, where the screening of access to and enforcement of cosmopolitan behavior during concerts gestures to a particular negotiation of the city and of public politics in process (Tobin 2012; Schwedler 2010). This excerpt from dissertation research insists on a critical discussion of class in an analysis of increasing(ly) cosmopolitan cultural production in Amman.