Palestinian Cultural Resistance Against the Israeli Cell

• In Event: Social Movements, Learning Sciences, and Possibilities for Transformation

Abstract

Purpose
Palestinians have used the realm of culture as an arena for struggle and resistance against settler colonialism, occupation, apartheid, and oppression from the days of the Ottoman occupation till the present Israeli occupation. This paper discusses the importance of cultural resistance in the Palestinian struggle. In particular, this paper focuses on examining culture produced by Palestinian political prisoners and by Palestinians artists in solidarity with political prisoners. The objective is to examine prison literature from the Occupied Territories and the pedagogical ways in which people use this literature to produce knowledge of land, resistance, liberation and life.

Perspectives
The theoretical framework for this poster includes a theory of resistance cultures, drawing from the Palestinian anti-colonial theorist Ghassan Kanafani. By applying Ghassan Kanafani’s (1966) concept of “resistance literature” this paper will document and analyze various ways in which the arts have been used to express resistance against Israel’s unjust imprisonment of Palestinians.

Methods and Data
I examine cultural work produced by two political prisoners and two Palestinian artists that have expressed solidarity with political prisoners. Through a discourse analysis of the various texts (visual images, poetry, songs and interviews) the paper interrogates the discourse of (in) security and terror that Israel uses to defend its unjust domination and imprisonment of thousands of Palestinians in Israeli jails.

Results
I draw from Agamben’s (2005) notion of “the state of exception”– the suspension of the rule of law – to demonstrate the way in which laws stop applying for the rule of life by the sovereign (Israel), and the oppression/death of the other (Palestinians) whose lives have been rendered bare, as they are constituted to a different order of humanity.
More importantly, I answer the following questions: why do prisoners engage in cultural production while in prison, what themes emerge in the cultural work produced by both political prisoners and those in solidarity with prisoners, and what do cultural producers do with art produced in prison/in solidarity with prisoners. I theoretically draw from Ghassan Kanafani’s “resistance literature” to answer these questions, while also theorizing the relevance of cultural resistance in the struggle for freedom.

Significance
There is limited research in education on military occupation in the Middle East, in particular the experiences of political prisoners, and the pedagogical possibilities of the work of the oppressed/colonized.

Author

• Chandni Desai, OISE/University of Toronto