Contesting Temporalities of Empire: Palestinian Youth Movement’s Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Anthology

• In Event: Palestine Solidarity and Resistances to Empire: Diasporic Cultural Production as Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Since its emergence in 2016, Palestinian Youth Movement’s (PYM) annual Ghassan Kanafani (GK) Resistance Arts Anthology and scholarship has been a publishing, mentorship, and movement-building resource for Palestinian youth in Turtle Island (North America). Every year, a call for submissions is released by PYM, and a unique jury of artists, cultural workers, and scholars is assembled to curate the anthology by evaluating the submissions, choosing a theme, and awarding scholarships. These jury members, many of who are well-established in their respective fields, not only help young artists gain visibility for their work but build a larger movement through collective struggle in the heart of empire. Employing conjunctural analysis, close reading, interviews, and digital ethnography, this paper focuses on the fourth Ghassan Kanafani Resistance Arts Anthology, Knocking on the Doors of Jerusalem (2019), which engages significantly with the concept of futures. In particular, I examine its introduction “Remembering the Future,” written by jurors Fargo Tbakhi, Chandni Desai, and Philip Metres, the recording of the digital launch party in 2020, and the top three submissions by Lina Mohammad Abojaradeh, Noura Farouk, and Kaleem Hawa. Through their collective works, this paper explores how cultural production challenges settler colonial progressive and linear temporalities and provides counter-temporalities of survival, resistance, and hope. As Tbakhi, Desai and Metres write in the introduction, “Perhaps we enact the future each time we breathe, or eat, or write, or paint, and each time we do, some long ago ancestor begins again to do the same.” They show that the past is not a fossil to be commemorated, but a living, ongoing project that is being adapted for the purposes of a changing liberation struggle. Through these expressions, these contributors assert that the future is unoccupied -- from the river to the sea, and from Turtle Island to Palestine.

Author

• Robin Gabriel, University of California Santa Cruz