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97 6 Performing Self: Between Tradition and Modernity in the West Bank Sylvia Alajaji Freed from its various earlier involvements, consciousness views its own past layers and their content in perspective; it keeps confronting them with another , emancipating them from their exterior temporal continuity as well as from the narrow meanings they seemed to have when they were bound to a particular present. —Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature Upon my return to the United States from the West Bank, friends, family, and colleagues all wanted to know how my research went, but those inquiries were often secondary to the more general (yet quite loaded), “What was it like?” Aside from the realities both they and I expected I would experience (the checkpoints, the soldiers, the wall), the message I wanted to communicate most of all was the awareness with which the Palestinians I encountered navigated, negotiated, and articulated the many layers inherent in their overwhelmingly politicized identities . I was there to study Palestinian music and identity in the refugee camps of the West Bank, specifically as expressed through the well-documented hip-hop scene. But from the first eye rolls I received after my initial inquiry into hip-hop’s place in the Palestinian soundscape to the heated debates that would transpire after ostensibly simple questions about the reasons for the preponderance of fallā. h (peasant) characterizations and village folk songs in programs and recitals put on by the children of the camps, it became clear that each musical utterance carries 98 | Sylvia Alajaji with it the burden of representing “Palestine”—a burden of which my interviewees were well aware. For in their rolled eyes and exasperated sighs were not necessarily judgments on the aesthetic qualities of those musical expressions after which I inquired, but an exasperation with the burden of representation they each must carry and the essentialist narratives they espouse—or, rather, are seen to espouse. In this essay I examine the ways the Palestinian soundscape becomes implicated in the trappings of identity politics and look at the tensions between tradition and modernity that emerge in the musical expressions and activities of the various cultural centers in Ramallah and refugee camps in the West Bank. At issue here is not whether or not these musics are implicated (clearly, they are), but rather how each genre—from folklore to hip-hop—must answer for, symbolize, and epitomize “Palestine” and how this burden of representation plays out among the different strata and generations of Palestinian society. Each genre potentially represents a different Self, and when considering the immediacy of the identity politics at play, the Selves these disparate genres represent evoke a multiplicity that threatens any purported cultural singularity. Of the exilic condition, Edward Said once lamented: “There is this tremendous thing about authenticity and ethnic particularity. The politics of identity is the problem: the failure to take account of, and accept, the migratory quality of experience” (2001, 222). He continues: “Instead of seeing it as something beyond the binary opposition, ‘us versus them,’ and therefore being able to see it in different terms, there’s this obsession about returning to yourself: only in the community , and the purer form of the community is my salvation—which is, I think, a form of perdition” (221–22; my emphasis). These expressions of, and obsessions with, cultural particularity—this need to assert “authenticity in an environment which has been basically hostile” (221)—must also be seen as something productive , producing the discourse, or narrative, against which alternative expressions of the Self exist. These alternative expressions often evoke a hybridity that fundamentally conflicts with and compromises the essentialized Self that claims a purity—or particularity—under threat. When identity itself operates as a site of contestation, the channels through which it is mediated and negotiated—music, art, dance, literature, poetry, and so on—become spaces in which the Self is imagined and performed into being and thus become sites of contestation themselves. For the Palestinians, expressions of cultural particularity occur in an especially urgent capacity. As numerous scholars have noted (e.g., Abu-Lughod and Sa#di 2007a; Said 1979 and 1995; and Swedenburg 1990), the identity construction(s) at play must be seen as occurring against the backdrop of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, during which Palestinian land and livelihood—their identity—have been (and continue to be) under threat. Golda Meir’s comment that “there was no such thing as Palestinians . . . They did not exist” embodies the...

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