This paper addresses the complex and changing face of the Palestine Liberation Organisation at the end of the 20th century and its investment in cultural capital to promote a politics of liberation and attract support across a swathe of Palestinian society. Focusing on the period 1968 to 1974, the paper traces the PLO’s active investment in diverse forms of communication, media, film, literature, poster art and other cultural platforms to disseminate and normalise a politics of liberation as a political consciousness that would draw on particular symbols, tropes and mythology and that would attract cultural producers, activists, intellectuals and artists from diverse classes in Palestinian and Arab societies. Drawing on archival research as well as interviews with cultural producers and media personnel, the paper addresses how PLO elites actively occupied and created cultural platforms and strategically used popular culture to mobilise support and transform itself into the most potent contemporary social and political movement in the Arab world in the period under consideration. As part of the campaign, the PLO’s revolutionary vanguard, led by late chairman and Fatah leader Yasser Arafat, deployed diplomatic, political, military and other tools for mobilisation, and used popular culture – media, film, poetry, songs, poster art and performance – to mediate the revolution’s politics and secure legitimacy. Running hand in hand with military and political actions, social and welfare services, the mediation of the revolution/liberation in language, symbols, icons, rituals and affective language would help the PLO maintain overwhelming levels of popular identification despite military and political set-backs. This paper address how the PLO’s culture work constructed new subjectivities centred on radical understandings of what it means to Palestinian, and mediated the ‘Palestinian revolution’ as an aesthetic revolution that resonated with Palestinians’ lived realities and aspirations at the time and that evoked enduring affective identifications with the revolutionary impulse despite several defeats and political setbacks. This paper addresses how the PLO’s investment in cultural capital helped it become a touchstone for diverse projects in local and global cultural and political rebellion and create a new transnational class of political and cultural subjects attracted to its revolutionary impulse. The paper suggests that paying attention to the PLO’s cultural activism – its active investment in creating and sustaining culture allows us to address how cultural capital becomes materialised through the circulation, adoption and adaptation of significant tropes and symbols.

In political posters and in children’s books Palestinian female costumes symbolize nationalism defined “from below” and the persistence of Palestinian identity despite adversity. Traditionally embroidered by rural women, these costumes have a near-codified status reflecting a variety of regional styles. Over the past four decades, such embroidery has broken away from the idyllic photographs of peasant women, becoming more common on everyday items such as phonebooks, eyeglass cases, cushions, table runners, and coasters. This paper investigates the journey of embroidery from idealized images of Palestinian women to items characteristic of settings such as middle-class and upper-class homes. The paper looks at the various institutions that sponsored embroidery projects in Lebanon. Based on oral interviews and published cultural material, it focuses on the juncture between the War of 1967 and the expulsion of the PLO from Lebanon in 1982 as key in this transformation. Embroidery became part of two definitions of “work” in Lebanon after 1967: female work and Palestinian work. The first was forwarded by benevolent societies run by middle- and upper-class women aiming at providing work for women in the refugee camps of Lebanon. The second was forwarded as part of the PLO’s wider project of Palestinian labor, which sought to provide Palestinians with work in a restrictive Lebanese market. Studies on embroidery usually highlight its significance as Palestinian heritage and its symbolism in the construction of national identity. In addition, this paper argues, embroidery projects helped reconstitute Palestinian society in exile through definitions of work that involved the various socioeconomic classes partaking of such projects: upper-class philanthropists, middle-class revolutionaries and activists, and destitute refugees. At the same time, embroidery projects put forth incongruous assumptions about work and turned refugees of primarily peasant background into producers of items meant for consumption by the middle and upper classes living outside the refugee camps. By looking at how material culture and class constitute each other, the paper discusses how the commodification of embroidery papered over class tensions within Palestinian society in Lebanon and highlights the importance of relations of production and consumption to understanding the formation of Palestinian identity on the regional level.

On the 29th of April 2005, experimental Lebanese film maker Maher Abi Samra’s Dwar Shatila was screened in Qaat Al Shaab (the People’s Hall) in the Shatila Palestinian Refugee Camp in Beirut. The postcard invitation to the film’s viewing, designed by the film maker himself was a playful yet biting critique of Beirut’s art makers and art going public. The invitation featured a special map for the anticipated attendees of the film screening that takes Ras Beirut as its departure point and which purposefully (mis) leads to a maze of the tight streets and alleyways that define the camp and which Qaat Al Shaab nestles amongst. Having found themselves lost between its claustrophobic maze of tiny buildings and streets most attendees, including artists, curators, journalists and critics missed the point and as if falling for the film-makers provocations, commented instead on the difficulties and peculiarities of navigating the Camp, just like he envisioned they would. Taking its cue from Abi Samra’s sardonic comment on the invisibility of Lebanon’s Palestinians in Beirut’s transnationalized and internationally well-networked contemporary art scene, this paper will address how class as a field in the classical Bourdieuian sense, transnational cultural capital, and material culture coalesce in ways that reinforce the already existing marginality of Lebanon’s Palestinians, even when purporting to ‘speak’ for them or about them. Through a focus on Lebanese works of art, artistic projects and personal initiatives that make reference to or entirely elide the Palestinian refugee condition in Lebanon, the paper inserts the material culture representing a people rendered ‘invisible’ in to a paradigm that takes the twin effects of cultural and material capital circulation in the global art world as its focus. It unravels the ways in which cultural politics in Lebanon function to demarcate categories of identity and class that ultimately define how aesthetic materiality about invisibility is produced, consumed and circulated globally. As such the paper rethinks the recent backlash against traditional sociological accounts of art-such as those found in Howard Becker’s Art Worlds and Pierre Bourdieu’s The Field of Cultural Production and the Rules of Art-that have been criticized for overemphasizing the focus on factors of production at the expense of any agency the art may have. It suggests that bringing in materiality, class, and capital highlights how the relationship between material objects and their subjects perpetuates certain ideologies of exclusion.