Performing Resistance: Performative Responses to Foreign and Domestic Pressure in the Arab World
Panel 201, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Tuesday, November 24 at 10:30 am
Panel Description
This panel takes up “theater and performance” as a necessary concept in understanding popular, artistic, and militant responses to foreign aggression and domestic repression. Whether intended for marketplace gatherings, a local theatre audience, an on-line community, or international television viewers, growing numbers of Arabs have shaped performances to draw attention to perceived grievances and to demand change. In the face of international silence on subjects ranging from Israeli aggression to human-rights abuses in Arab countries, and in defiance of government attempts to render invisible internal opposition, Arabs have looked for ways to make their positions spectacular. How does the performative format of this resistance shape its articulation and its effects?
Recent events in Gaza offer a vivid illustration of the range of strategies Arabs and Muslims have employed to make their positions visible in both new and traditional media. Arabs and Muslims in Middle Eastern countries took over the streets to demonstrate their anger against Israeli aggression, and western silence, towards Gaza. Artists in the Arab World, North Africa, Iran, Turkey and even in the Gulf countries dedicated paintings, wrote poems and editorials, held conferences and some—as in the case of the Palestinian theatre al-Kasaba in cooperation with Anad Theatre—staged theatre pieces. The internet was abuzz; Al-Jazeera’s English web video-stream saw a six-fold increase in worldwide viewership during the Gaza offensive, and countless petitions, photographs, and video clips circulated on-line in Arabic and other languages. However, this eruption of performance reflects an ongoing development as a growing number of groups and individuals have sought to claim a space on the public-stage, and have found increasingly spectacular means to do so.
As a follow up on last year’s MESA panel Under Western Eyes: Arab Performances and Dissident Politics Since 9/11, this year’s participants are asked to examine the relation between performance and politics in the public sphere. To what extent Middle Eastern artists, theatre practitioners, playwrights, dramatists, bloggers, and other popular performers and theatres address underlying binaries (local/global, modernity/heritage, Hadatha/Asalah, secularism/fundamentalism)? Given post 9/11 events, the Israeli/ Lebanese war in 2006, and the recent Israeli/Palestinian war, how do we read the dilemmas of the Arab youth in the context of the rise of Islamism and fundamentalism? Is the Middle Eastern political stage dictating the cultural platform? Or is popular culture influenced by nationalist agenda, Islamic agenda, or militant agenda?
Disciplines
Participants
-
Prof. Joel Gordon
-- Chair
-
Dr. Najat Rahman
-- Presenter
-
Dr. Hala Kh. Nassar
-- Organizer, Presenter
-
Dr. Rania Jawad
-- Presenter
-
Dr. Edward Ziter
-- Organizer, Presenter
Presentations
-
Dr. Najat Rahman
Palestinian artistic production in the diaspora has been gaining considerable international attention and recognition in the last decade. One can name the examples of such filmmakers as Elia Suleiman, Hany Abou Assad, and Anne-Marie Jacer, as well as of artists such as Mona Hattoum and Emily Jacer. Such visibility is testimony to the aesthetic innovations of the young artists and is critical to the dissemination of historically marginalized perspectives. Yet the study of the contribution of these artists remains in its inception. The visual artwork of Emily Jacer, « Where We Come From, » also included in Belongings, and Eman Haram’s photo exhibit, « Involuntary Memory, » inscribe a memory, intimate and plural, fluid and performative, across many displacements, that resists systematic erasure. Through different media, their work becomes a conscious intervention to counter such historical effacements and violent fragmentations. Rather than simply preserving a memory of what was, of the home before any displacement or loss, Jacer and Haram present a reflection on the effacement of collective memory and on the loss inherent in any displacement. Loss is no longer of an event passed but emerges as a continual experience of dispossession. One notes a dynamic search for form that could speak to the loss. Their production reveals how the political need not be at odds with the aesthetic. If the political is reconfigured, as it is in their art, as the concern for the other and the insistence on the human, then art may well be intrinsically political. The human dimension of loss and the fundamental need for memory in their artwork transcends any particular identity without eclipsing the historical.
-
Dr. Hala Kh. Nassar
The art angle in Palestinian lives is not usually covered much in the news reports, which Americans, and Europeans, let alone Arabs, hear when it comes to life under colonial rule. Yet, art production from the occupied territories has been leaving its powerful marks on the modern history of the Palestinians. Since 1967 Palestinian painting, sculpting, political posters, and installations have been signifying both continuity and rapture from premodern forms of Palestinian art, and yet narrate “familiar and unfamiliar” Palestinian national discourse in various forms. As Edward Said has put it, “ artists, like poets and novelist, “embod[y] the historical experience of their people in aesthetic works.” This paper attempts to follow the work of the Beit Jala artist, Nadira Araj, and looks at how her different forms of installations communicate visually what is beautiful and sublime in the Palestinian experience under occupation, even and especially when she has to tease it out of tragic scenery.
-
Dr. Rania Jawad
This paper will discuss the weekly Friday demonstrations and actions organized by the Palestinian residents of Bil’in against Israeli policies of land confiscation and illegal occupation and settlement of Palestinian lands. Israel has annexed close to sixty percent of Bil’in land for settlement expansion and the construction of its separation wall. Begun in 2005 and now organized by popular committee, the demonstrations in Bil’in are joined by Israeli and international activists. News on the demonstrations are recorded and circulated via oral testimony and modern technology, including email reports, youtube clips, photography exhibits, and documentary films.
While weekly demonstrations take place in a number of Palestinian villages affected by construction of the Wall (such as Jayyous, Nil’in, and Budrus), the actions in Bil’in have been noted for their highly deliberate theatrical staging, which has captured local and international media attention. For instance, in 2006 Bil’in called for the building of the ‘Falistin Hotel’ on Israeli occupied village land, erecting a seventeen by ten feet sign announcing its construction. More recently, in January of 2009 the protestors wore clothes reminiscent of those worn by Jews in Nazi concentration camps, including yellow cut-outs in the shape of Gaza with the word ‘Gazan.’ Such performance strategies have turned Bil’in into a symbol of an alternative form of resistance in Palestine.
Part of a long trajectory of Palestinian resistance against Zionist and Israeli colonization that extends pre-1948, the demonstrations in Bil’in are largely described (and applauded) as a form of ‘nonviolent’ resistance. Drawing on primary and secondary commentary on Bil’in’s protest actions (including personal observance), as well as literature addressing forms of Palestinian resistance and the politics of performance in the public sphere, I will examine how both the theatrical framing and the discourse of nonviolence have come to serve as two means of categorizing Bil’in’s public protests. The strategy of spectacle and the directed use of catchwords (such as nonviolent, peace, apartheid, terrorist) will be discussed using the case study of Bil’in, while emphasizing the significance of the relationship between performance and politics in the public sphere, specifically in the context of Palestine.
-
Dr. Edward Ziter
This paper examines images of Palestinian militancy in the theatre of Mamduh Adwan, arguing that within the orthodoxy of anit-Zionist politics, Adwan carved out a space for critiques of Arab populations, Arab governments, and Syrian foreign policy. Following the trajectory of Adwan's dramatic career, I examine an increasingly direct critique of the hypocrisy of Arab people and leaders in their pronounced support for the Palestinian cause. From an allegorical critique of the failure of Arab countries to defend Palestine in 1948 in one of his earliest plays (The Man Who Didn't Fight 1972) Adwan would eventually proceed to an attack on Syria's responsibility for the violence in Palestinian refugee camps (The Day of Judgment 1987). The power of such critiques is all the more apparent when compared with the work of Ali Aqla Arsan, playwright and Baath party member, whose work is more closely allied with the vision of the Palestinian conflict espoused by Syrian political elites.
