1,721,048 research outputs found
Refugees and Cathartic Politics
Full text linkPalestinian refugees in Lebanon are often described as living in a condition of waithood, suspended from law and awaiting return to their national homeland, where they will finally turn into qualified political lives. This frame, stemming from Hannah Arendt’s legacy, fetishizes rights and the nation-state as the spheres where the human ceases to be a mere biological body subject to humanitarian relief and finally turns into a fully fledged subject of rights. This article, in contrast, interrogates the possibility of political lives in gray areas. It asks, what conditions of being human are attainable in a context of juridical suspension? Can exile become grounds for an articulation of rights that overcomes the political, juridical, and emotive national frame as the only space for existing in the world? The article suggests understanding Palestinian refugees’ political subjectivity in Lebanon today not through the frame of defeat and demise—or as bare lives (Agamben)—but through the Gramscian lens of the cathartic moment. It explores the political work of catharsis as an emotional, moral, and rhetorical form of collective outbreak from national frames. Through catharsis and paroxysm, refugees expose the fallacies of humanitarianism and nation-state–based conception of rights and instead articulate a novel imaginary of a borderless humanity as a basis for politically qualified lives
Bodies that walk, bodies that talk, bodies that love. Palestinian women refugees, affectivity and the politics of the ordinary
No full textIn this article I interrogate what is lost in war and displacement through the memories of elderly Palestinian refugee women who remember through their body and what their body has endured. I want to suggest that their affective, sensorial, bodily memories excite modes of relating to space and place that shy away from the abstract nostalgia for a lost nation, while bringing to light the closeness and concreteness of things and subjects, reviving bodily vulnerability and grief for the loss of the ordinary and the intimate. I focus on women’s recollection of their bodies walking, swimming, crossing through an unfamiliar territory with unknown people to reach safety. Taken in their metaphor as “social ‘muscles’” (Hardt 2011, 680), as bodily and emotional drives that extend across and blur the boundaries of intimate and social spaces, affective memories can serve as a political horizon that redesigns, in Arendtian terms, the love for the nation as love for the people and for existing in the world (Young- Bruehl 1982)
Palestine beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims
Full text linkThe “national” has functioned as the affective and symbolic frame for the political project of liberation for Palestinians and has also been the underlying grid of most of the scholarly work on Palestine. This issue goes beyond national frames to disclose a different dimension of the Palestinian politics of liberation. It sheds light on an indigenous population engaged in ongoing and everyday collective resistance to protect their “home” and defend their “land”—as these are constantly reconfigured and imagined across place and time—rather than a memorialized homeland or national territory
Displacing the Anthropocene: Colonisation, extinction and the unruliness of nature in Palestine
Full text linkRecent ‘Anthropocene’ commentaries have argued that as humans have become decisively entangled in natural systems, they collectively became a geological species-agent potentially becoming aware of its own place in the deep history of planetary time. Through this, the argument goes, a pre-political collective consciousness could emerge, paving the way for a progressive construction of a common world, beyond particularistic justice-claims. The reverse case is made in scholarship of settler colonialism: the Anthropocene is rooted in histories of settler colonial violence and is deeply tied up with the dispossession and ‘extinction’ of Indigenous life-worlds. In this article, we foreground nature–human entanglement as crucial for understanding the operations but also the instability of settler colonialism in Palestine. We suggest that fractures and openings become legible when paying attention to the ‘afterlife’ of nature that was erased due to its enmeshment with Indigenous people. We provide a historical and ethnographic account of past and emerging entanglements between Palestinians refugees and their nature, ultimately arguing that indigeneity is recalcitrant to obliteration. With that in mind, we return to the Anthropocene’s focus on universal human extinction and ethical consciousness by critically engaging with it from the standpoint of colonised and displaced Indigenous populations, like the Palestinian refugees. We conclude by arguing that only when the profoundly unequal access to Life entrenched in settler colonialism is foregrounded and addressed, does a real possibility of recognising any common, global vulnerability that the species faces emerge
Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: On the Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect
No full textIn “Cultures of Resistance in Palestine and Beyond: The Politics of Art, Aesthetics, and Affect,” Sophie Richter-Devroe and Ruba Salih introduce the imperatives, questions, and ideas that inspired the special issue we are featuring here. Encompassing a broad array of approaches, methodologies, and perspectives, Rania Jawad, Adila Laïdi-Hanieh, Maha Nassar, Helga Tawil-Souri, Miriyam Aouragh, Craig Larkin, Brahim El Guabli, Hanan Toukan, and Yazid Anani each take on the relationship between cultural production and political resistance. For the Arab world and the Middle East more broadly, these questions are as timely today as ever. But beyond the urgencies of the moment, the special issue editors and contributors provide us with a powerful set of empirical research and analytical reflections that thinkers, artists, students, and teachers will be able to refer to, learn form, and build on for years to come
Gender and mobility across Southern and Eastern European borders : "double standards" and the ambiguities of European neighbourhood policy
No full textThis article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP), a policy framework that, amongst other things, aims to facilitate the mobility of migrants to the EU from the bordering countries. We highlight the ambivalences of European regimes of gender and migration, and we take issue with the celebration of the "feminisation of migration." The former fails to offer opportunities to women to safely embark on autonomous migratory projects, the latter contributes to reproduce traditional gender biases in the countries of origin as well as of destination. We conclude by suggesting that the EU critique to emigration countries for failing to tackle women's discrimination falls short of persuasiveness when confronted with the curtailment on women's independent mobility within the ENP framework
Policing gender mobilities: interrogating the ‘feminisation of migration’ to Europe
Full text linkThis article proposes a gendered critique of the European Neighbourhood Policy, a framework that, amongst other things, aims to facilitate the mobility of migrants to the EU from the bordering countries. We highlight the ambivalences of European gender and migration regimes, and we take issue with the celebration of the ‘feminisation of migration’. The former fails to offer opportunities to women to safely embark on autonomous migratory projects, the latter contributes to reproduce traditional gender biases in the countries of origin as well as of destination. We conclude by suggesting that the EU critique to emigration countries for failing to tackle women’s discrimination is less than persuasive when assessed vis-á-vis with the curtailment on women’s independent mobility across European borders
Rethinking Justice Beyond Human Rights. Anti-colonialism and intersectionality in the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement
Full text linkThis article discusses the politics of the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM)–a contemporary social movement operating across a number of Arab and western countries. Unlike analysis on the Arab Uprisings which focused on the national dimension of youth activism, we explore how the PYM politics fosters and upholds an explicitly transnational anti-colonial and intersectional solidarity framework, which foregrounds a radical critique of conventional notions of self-determination based on state-framed human rights discourses and international law paradigms. The struggle becomes instead framed as an issue of justice, freedom and liberation from interlocking forms and hierarchies of oppression.</p
‘From Standing Rock to Palestine We are United’: diaspora politics, decolonization and the intersectionality of struggles
Full text linkThis article analyses a form of diasporic activism that breaks the seeming duality between diasporic imaginaries and colonial realities, diasporas and refugees. By focusing on the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM) it analyses a diasporic standpoint which is not confined to identity politics, nor to the Palestinian nationalist struggle of territorial liberation, but conceives of Palestine as one of the most visible, present-day materializations of Western colonial modernity. The condition of this diasporic political subjectivity lies in what we call here an “intersectional ‘space of appearance’”: an affective multi-sited political space that exposes and makes visible the continuum of systems of subjugation and expropriation across liberal democracies and settler-colonial regimes, and the whiteness of mainstream activist spaces. This space encompasses key sites of Black, Indigenous, Arab and Muslim mobilization: from Ferguson to Standing Rock, from the Mexico-US border to Palestine and Palestinian camps, from Tunis to Paris.</p
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