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175 11 The Ghosts of Resistance: Dispatches from Palestinian Art and Music Yara El-Ghadban and Kiven Strohm In the summer of 2010 Palestinian artists Emily Jacir and Yazid Anani installed two billboards in downtown Ramallah as part of a public intervention called alRiy ā. d. Visually mimicking the urban-development genre, the two billboards ironically questioned the erosion of a collective Palestinian political project through the building of gated communities (that look conspicuously similar to illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank) and the creation of a Dubai-style business tower that was to be constructed atop Ramallah’s fruit and vegetable market. Their work was part of a larger exhibition titled Ramallah: The Fairest of Them All? produced by the Birzeit Ethnographic and Art Museum and the Ramallah municipality. Yet within twenty-four hours the municipality, calling the billboards “problematic,” removed them. Despite demands from the artists and the organizers of the exhibition to discontinue such acts of censorship, both the mayor of Ramallah and the director of the municipality remained steadfast in their decision and offered no further clarification of their problematic nature.1 While the Ramallah municipality had initially approved Jacir and Anani’s public intervention, the problem with the works arguably centered on their exposure of the destruction of a collective political project through the neoliberal and neocapitalist agenda being pushed through by the Palestinian National Authority (PNA). In other words, it exposed the divide between the political program of the PNA and the collective political project of the Palestinian people, whereby causing embarrassment for the PNA. More importantly, however, the works exposed the complicated role of culture and cultural practices in a paradoxical context in which occupation, continued colonization, and state-building initiatives coexist. 176 | Yara El-Ghadban and Kiven Strohm For years Palestinian artists and musicians have struggled against their work being interpreted exclusively within the paradigm of liberation politics,2 which sees the task of art and music, their raison d’être, as the emancipation of Palestinians and Palestine from the stranglehold of colonialism and occupation—in short, art and music at the service of politics.3 Yet, while constantly trying to escape the reductive discourses surrounding culture and politics, including those defended by Palestinian political representatives like the PNA, many refuse to give up engaging with it in their work. This tension between nationalist liberation discourse and the creative strategies of Palestinian artists and musicians has been exacerbated by the interest taken by international cultural actors, organizations, and institutions with Palestinian artists, and by the gradual move by international nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and humanitarian aid agencies toward funding cultural projects in the Occupied Palestinian Territories. Together these have resulted in an unprecedented dissemination of Palestinian cultural production , both locally and globally. Palestinian artists and musicians are confronted today with an increasing range of brokers and mediators that include, among others , the PNA, Western and Palestinian humanitarian aid agencies and NGOs, art museum and gallery curators, and connoisseurs and music industry representatives from all over the world. Why are these international actors taking an interest in Palestinian culture now? How is the link between culture and politics being articulated in this context? What are the political and aesthetic repercussions of the internationalization and humanitarization of Palestinian art and music? And, finally, how does the current situation affect the discourse on “culture as liberation ” and “culture as resistance” that dominated studies of Palestinian art and music during the twentieth century and continues to inform most sociocultural analysis of Palestinian culture today? We argue that Palestinian music and art have been represented through three ideological frameworks that have informed the roles and meanings attributed to cultural practices in Palestinian society: culture as survival, culture as resistance, and culture as a site for humanitarian intervention and development. Although emerging at different moments over the last one hundred years, these frames of reference tend to overlap and interact, creating tensions with which musicians and artists continue to struggle. In making this argument, we are admittedly taking a step back from music making and art making as practice and focusing on the discourses that have surrounded them. These discourses have been mobilized to varying degrees by scholars, by Palestinians in their daily representations and interactions with music and art, as well as by mediators and cultural brokers like NGOs. In other words, this is not about Palestinian music and art per se, but about the discourse on Palestinian music and art. As such, our argument is not ethnographic...

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