| الوصف: |
This research project explores the relationship between Palestinian cultural production, urban expansion/renewal, settler colonialism, and late capitalism in the post-Oslo historical conjuncture in Israel/Palestine. Using in-depth interviews with Palestinian artists, archival materials and audio-visual materials, the project traces the journeys of Palestinian artists as they navigate the socio-spatial processes reproducing the urban fabrics of two cities: Haifa in the north of historic Palestine (today’s Israel) and Ramallah in central West Bank. I look at the Palestinian village of ‘Ayn Hawd in Haifa and its transformation into the arts settler colony of Ein Hod in 1953; the layered history of dispossession, first of the Palestinian in 1948, then of the Arab Jew in 1959 in Wadi Salib; and the contemporary urban expansion and renewal, respectively, of the Ramallah and Haifa and their associated forms of cultural production. The project makes two overarching arguments. First, I argue that the dispossession of the Palestinian and the racialization of the Arab Jew serve as the inherited background within which modes of urban production across Israel/Palestine unfold. In the second vein, I read the urban transformations in the two cities since the early 1990s as reflective of the increasingly central role the market has come to play following the neoliberalisation of the Israeli economy in 1985 and the Oslo Agreement in 1993 and their concomitant fashioning of consumerist subjects across the ‘Green Line.’ In this context of dispossession, I posit that Palestinian arts and cultural boycotts connote ‘practices of articulation’ that mean (via Antonio Gramsci and Stuart Hall) neither total incorporation into, nor a total reclaiming of the settler colonial spatialization of the city. Rather, I argue that they are part of a necessarily unequal struggle towards opening up cultural possibilities. The project contributes to two overarching debates: the first pertains to human geography and focuses on the relationship between ... |
