Refiguring the Divide: Artistic Responses to Partition in Palestine/Israel
Seminar Organizer(s):
- Michal Raizen (The University of Texas at Austin), Chana Morgenstern (Brown University)
This seminar will investigate the impact of partition on cultural production and socio-political networks in Palestine/Israel and the larger Middle East. In approaching partition as a critical space for artistic innovation and political resistance, we seek to explore the aesthetic choices, expressions of subjectivity, narrative structures, syntaxes of language, image, and sound within Palestinian and Israeli culture, literature, film, and music. How do these forms of expression represent and embody partition? What aesthetic and formal strategies are used to capture the presence and influence of partition on everyday life, culture and space? Do the foundational structures of partition interrupt the art work as they interrupt social and national life? How do the violence and militarism of partition organize, disorganize or infect the literary text or visual terrain? Finally, how do works of art, to quote Gil Hochberg, “not only reflect historical and sociopolitical realities but further compete with them, introducing alternative actualities, which might find expression only at the level of cultural imagination?”
Topics may include but are not limited to:
- The impact of partition on relations between Arab intellectuals in Palestine/Israel and the larger Arab world
- Translation between Hebrew and Arabic and the effects of partition on the circulation of texts
- The Palestinian-Israeli and the Arab-Jew: disrupting the logic of partition
- Refiguring the contours of linguistic and cultural ownership in Hebrew and Arabic literatures
- Cinematic challenges to the visual and acoustic codes of partition
- Partition and social media
SEMINAR KEYWORDS: Partition, Palestine, Israel, Arab-Jew, Palestinian-Israeli, Hebrew, Arabic, translation,
Middle East