Anna Bernard

Another Black September? Palestinian writing after 9/11

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, the dormant figure of the “Palestinian terrorist” was revived for American public discourse. The Palestinian novelist Sahar Khalifeh responded critically to this development in her 2004 novel Rabi’ Harr [Hot Spring], a Bildungsroman about a “terrorist” whose turn to violence is motivated by the bleak conditions of life under occupation after the Oslo Accords and by the 2002 attacks on civilians in Jenin. Khalifeh’s novel suggests that the human rights narrative takes on a particular urgency in Palestinian writing after 9/11, as a means of countering the renewed currency of invidious stereotypes of Palestinians.

No Way Through: approaching the West Bank checkpoint

This article considers the intriguing frequency of “proxy crossings” by British and American protagonists in international cultural advocacy that seeks to represent the West Bank checkpoint. This highly visible instance of the global checkpoint is the site of a spectacular confrontation between opposing notions of safety, embodied in the encounter between the Israeli soldier guarding the checkpoint and the Palestinian who seeks to pass through it. The narratives I am interested in prompt their readers or viewers to imagine themselves as the person requesting passage by placing a metropolitan protagonist at the checkpoint. Through this act of substitution, metropolitan audiences are asked not simply to side with Palestinians, but to share in their sense of fear and endangerment, and to recognize their common yet unequal implication in the global security order. At the same time, however, audiences are also reminded of the limits of this form of empathetic identification. When the intermediary figures in these narratives approach the checkpoint with fear and then cross it without incident, they are compelled to acknowledge their own safety, and in acknowledging that safety to feel shame, to feel ashamed that they are safe when others are not. The checkpoint thus becomes a site of political conversion, a site where the protagonist, standing in for the reader or viewer, can be persuaded to stand in solidarity with Palestinians.

Cultural Activism as resource: Pedagogies of resistance and solidarity

Abstract This article engages with the notion that literature and other forms of cultural production are themselves resources. This idea becomes especially suggestive in relation to the cultural activism of international solidarity movements, which deploy artistic works as sources of information and inspiration for “distant issue” activism. Focusing on documentary films and novels circulated among anti-apartheid and Palestine solidarity activists in the long 1970s, the article explores the ways in which such works provide theorizations of the resource-value of cultural activism, particularly in its aesthetics of resistance and emphasis on the documentary real. These works advocate a comprehensive understanding of the political calculations and commitments of domestic activists, and seek to preserve and sustain their ideas for transnational resistance movements to mobilize in response to intensifying resource-based crisis, including the struggles over distribution, access and control that are yet to come.

The Judicial Imagination: Writing after Nuremberg

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Taking sides: Palestinian advocacy and metropolitan theatre

The political and documentary turn in Anglophone metropolitan theatre in the new millennium has generated a number of plays that address the question of Palestine. Israel/Palestine presents itself as a site in which fundamental social change is still possible, making it an especially productive setting for political theatre. This article focuses on two of the most high-profile plays of the last ten years: Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner’s My Name is Rachel Corrie (2005) and Caryl Churchill’s Seven Jewish Children: A Play for Gaza (2009). It examines not only the controversies that each of these plays engendered, but also the ways in which they negotiate the tensions that are inherent in the very notion of advocacy in theatre, which connotes two distinct forms of address: on the one hand, the effort to generate empathy and humanitarian feeling without specifying a political commitment; on the other, the attempt to persuade a viewer to affiliate with a particular struggle or set of beliefs, and to commit herself or himself to action. The article thus seeks to bring together three areas of enquiry that have been marginalized in postcolonial studies: the question of Palestine, theatre and the role of cultural production in political movements.

Orientalism: Legacies of a Performance

Books, as Catullus reminds us, have fates of their own. Our concern is with the fate of one book, Edward Said’s Orientalism. To many, this seminal work is an enduring touchstone, a founding text of the field of postcolonial studies and a book that continues to influence debates in literary and cultural studies, Middle Eastern studies, anthropology, art history, history and politics. To others, however, Orientalism has serious failings, not least in blaming the wrong people - namely, Orientalists - for the crimes of European imperialism. Thirty-five years after its first edition, popular and academic reactions to Orientalism continue to run the gamut from enthusiasm to apoplexy. Yet few assessments of this work ask the ‘so what?’ question, addressing the book’s contemporary relevance without lionizing or demonizing its author. This is our aim in Debating Orientalism. Bridging the gap between intellectual history and political engagement, the contributors to this volume interrogate Orientalism’s legacy with a view to moving the debate about this text beyond the Manichean limitations within which it has all too often been imprisoned. Too much ink has been spilled on what Orientalism got right or wrong - especially in its historical and political registers - and too little on taking stock of its impact and building on that to appraise its significance to current debates in multiple fields. This book seeks to consider Orientalism’s implications with a little less feeling, though no less commitment to understanding the value and political effects of engaged scholarship.

A Young Palestinian's Diary, 1941–1945: the life of Sami ‘Amr

researchers, students and the general public. The scope of primary sources, including photographs, texts and caricatures, is impressive and indicates thorough research. The author used a semiotic research method to analyse these sources and tried to “read” the clothing as a language, while examining the attitude of people who lived during this period toward the Israeli dress culture. The book’s contribution is in that it skilfully connects between dress and society and vice versa, and uses dress to expose the social context of the State in its early years. It takes the reader on a fascinating journey of acquaintance with the array of social aspects during this period: culture, identity, ethnic relations, military, economy, religion, social boundaries, politics, generation and gender differences, trends of inclusion and exclusion, verbal and nonverbal communication, and more. The book illuminates the role of dress in the Israeli project of building a nation, at the national representative level, as well as the way in which dress patterns were moulded among broad social strata. This is a social history of everyday life, which does not focus on the political and social thought of the elites, but rather on the lower statuses, who according to this viewpoint comprise an active and influencing factor on the action of the ruling stratum. The picture obtained from the analytical analysis in this book is that secondary groups managed to challenge the hegemonic model of austere clothing, and to express their ideology by means of their fashionable dress. The challenge illuminates the ambivalence at the root of Zionist ideology from the onset: between the aspiration to “be as all nations” and the desire to be “a spiritual guide for the nations.” Over the years, the dictates of Western fashion which permeated the state in its early years became the main Israeli dress pattern, indicating that “something that begins as a fashion can turn into a tradition.” The book is recommended for anyone interested in fashion, moulding of the collective identity, the history of the State of Israel, and the emergent (informal) cultural pluralism in the early years of the state, as symbolically reflected in the coat of many colours of Joseph, beloved son of Jacob: one garment with many colours.