Abstract
This chapter outlines the book’s theoretical underpinnings, questions, and its structure and empirical contributions. Situating Palestinian theatre in the context of Israeli settler-colonialism, this chapter delineates an analytical framework primarily inspired by the concept of ‘colonial abjection.’ If the Zionist public sphere reveals itself through the ways in which Palestine and Palestinians are rendered abject, then the Nakba resulting from the creation of Israel serves as the nurturing logic for Palestinian cultural works. Palestinian theatre manifests as a form of anti-colonial resistance through the becoming-subject of what can be defined as an ‘abject counterpublic.’ Mapping these sites of contestation, this book explores the tactics theatre-makers adopt to evade the Zionist public sphere, the emerging counter-discourses, and how these discourses are articulated in performance spaces.
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- 1.
The Freedom Theatre, ‘Annual Report 2016,’ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/annual-report-2016 (accessed November 11, 2018). For the festival and forum programme, see: The Freedom Theatre, ‘TFT10,’ http://www.thefreedomtheatre.org/tft10 (accessed November 11, 2018).
- 2.
Following the War of 1967, more than 300,000 Palestinians (over a quarter of the population) either fled or were expelled from their homes in the West Bank and Gaza, eventually settling in either Jordan or Egypt. See: Benny Morris, Righteous Victims: A History of the Zionist-Arab Conflict, 1881–2001, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001, pp. 328–29.
- 3.
The original French title of Chapter 5 of Black Skin, White Masks—‘L’expérience vécue du Noir,’ or ‘The lived experience of the black man’—is often mistranslated into English as ‘The fact of blackness.’ Since ‘blackness’ is not an essence for Fanon, it follows that there cannot be a ‘fact of blackness.’
- 4.
In a paper on Fanon and Audre Lorde, the philosopher Shiloh Whitney calls attention to the prominence Fanon gives to the term ‘negrophobia’ in his account of colonial racism. In a section entitled ‘Negrophobia as racializing horror,’ she says: ‘The Freudian analysis of phobia on which Fanon is drawing positions not shame [as read through his famous encounter with the child in Paris, and Sartre’s theory of being-for-others] but horror as the characteristic phobic affect.’ See: Shiloh Whitney, ‘The Affective Forces of Racialization: Affects and Body Schemas in Fanon and Lorde,’ Knowledge Cultures, vol. 3, no. 1, 2015, pp. 45–64 (46, original emphasis).
- 5.
Fanon’s original statement reads: ‘For not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man.’
- 6.
See, also: Nur Masalha, Expulsion of the Palestinians: The Concept of “Transfer” in Zionist Political Thought, 1882–1948, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992; Nur Masalha, A Land without a People: Israel, Transfer, and the Palestinians 1949–96, London: Faber, 1997; and Nur Masalha, Imperial Israel and the Palestinians: The Politics of Expansion, London: Pluto Press, 2000.
- 7.
It should be noted that their status as ‘permanent residents’ does not confer Israeli citizenship on Palestinians living in Jerusalem nor does it allow them to vote in national elections. Despite its name, the residency permit can be revoked at any time. Figures compiled by the human rights organization B’Tselem indicate that Israel has revoked the residency status of thousands of Jerusalemite Palestinians since 1967, often deporting them to the West Bank. See: B’Tselem—The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, ‘Revocation of Residency in Jerusalem,’ January 1, 2011, http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/revocation_of_residency (accessed September 13, 2015); and B’Tselem, ‘Statistics on the Revocation of Residency in Jerusalem,’ January 11, 2011, http://www.btselem.org/jerusalem/revocation_statistics (accessed September 13, 2015).
- 8.
For more on the geographic, demographic and cultural transformation of Palestine since the nineteenth century, see: Ibrahim Abu-Lughod (ed.), The Transformation of Palestine: Essays on the Origin and Development of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1971; Walid Khalidi, All That Remains: The Palestinian Villages Occupied and Depopulated by Israel in 1948, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1992; Nur Masalha, The Palestine Nakba: Decolonising History, Narrating the Subaltern, Reclaiming Memory, London: Zed Books, 2011; Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004; Basheer Nijim and Bishara Muammar, Towards the De-Arabization of Palestine/Israel, 1945–1977, Dubuque, IA: Kendall & Hunt Publishing, 1984; and Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, Oxford: Oneworld, 2006.
- 9.
The term politicide is taken from: Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War Against the Palestinians, New York: Verso, 2003. Kimmerling defines politicide as ‘a process that has, as its ultimate goal, the dissolution of the Palestinian people’s existence as a legitimate social, political and economic entity’ (ibid., 3–4). Furthermore, he writes, ‘[p]oliticide is a process that covers a wide range of social, political and military activities whose goal is to destroy the political and national existence of a whole community of people and thus deny it the possibility of self-determination’ (ibid., 4).
- 10.
For a comprehensive database of such laws, see: Adalah—The Legal Center for Arab Minority Rights in Israel, ‘Discriminatory Laws in Israel,’ n.d., http://www.adalah.org/en/law/index (accessed September 13, 2015).
- 11.
In the last three decades, a wealth of literature has been published on de-development and fragmentation in Palestine. On the de-development of the Palestinian economy, see: Sara Roy, The Palestinian Economy and the Oslo Process: Decline and Fragmentation, Abu Dhabi: Emirates Center for Strategic Studies and Research, 1998; Sara Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, Washington, DC: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995; Mandy Turner and Omar Shweiki (eds), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-Development and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014; Khalil Nakhleh, The Myth of Palestinian Development: Political Aid and Sustainable Deceit, East Jerusalem: PASSIA, 2004; Sara Roy, ‘De-development Revisited: Palestinian Economy and Society since Oslo,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 28, no. 3, 1999, pp. 64–82; Sara Roy, ‘The Gaza Strip: A Case of Economic De-development,’ Journal of Palestine Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 1987, pp. 56–88; and Sara Roy, ‘The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict and Palestinian Socioeconomic Decline: A Place Denied,’ International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society, vol. 17, no. 3, 2004, pp. 365–403. On the fragmentation of social formations, see: Rema Hammami, ‘Palestinian NGOs since Oslo: From NGO Politics to Social Movements?’ Middle East Report, no. 214, 2000, pp. 16–19, 27, 48; Sari Hanafi and Linda Tabar, ‘The Intifada and the Aid Industry: The Impact of the New Liberal Agenda on the Palestinian NGOs,’ Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, vol. 23, nos. 1 and 2, 2003, pp. 205–14; Molly Kane, ‘International NGOs and the Aid Industry: Constraints on International Solidarity,’ Third World Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 8, 2013, pp. 1505–15; and Sibille Merz, ‘The “Missionaries of the New Era”: Neoliberalism and NGOs in Palestine,’ Race & Class, vol. 54, no. 1, 2012, pp. 50–66.
- 12.
Naftali Bennett, ‘Israel—Fighting for Your Freedom,’ YouTube, February 17, 2015, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1LmsI1viJsI (accessed August 19, 2015).
- 13.
For more on hasbara, see: Gal Hadari and Asaf Turgeman, ‘Public Diplomacy in Army Boots: The Chronic Failure of Israel’s Hasbara,’ Israel Studies, vol. 24, no. 3, 2018, pp. 482–99; Giora Goodman, ‘Explaining the Occupation: Israeli Hasbara and the Occupied Territories in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War,’ Journal of Israeli History, Politics, Society, Culture, vol. 36, no. 1, 2017, pp. 71–93; and Miriyam Aouragh, ‘Hasbara 2.0: Israel’s Public Diplomacy in the Digital Age,’ Middle East Critique, vol. 25, no. 3, 2016, pp. 271–97.
- 14.
Interview with Ari Shavit, Ha’aretz, February 2, 2001. Ehud Barak’s remarks are quoted in Jerome Slater, ‘What Went Wrong?: The Collapse of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process,’ Political Science Quarterly, vol. 116, no. 2, 2001, pp. 171–99 (180).
- 15.
For a discussion of the initial critiques of Habermas’s study, see: P. U. Hohendahl, ‘Critical Theory, Public Sphere and Culture: Jürgen Habermas and His Critics,’ New German Critique, no. 16, 1979, pp. 89–118. For a contemporary English-language discussion, see: C. Calhoun (ed), Habermas and the Public Sphere, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Habermas’s response to these essays, entitled ‘Further Reflections on the Public Sphere,’ is contained in this volume (pp. 421–60).
- 16.
This is part of a wider conversation Butler is having in relation to the work of Slavoj Žižek and Jacques Lacan’s notion of méconnaisance or misrecognition.
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Varghese, G. (2020). Introduction. In: Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30247-4_1
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