From 4 to 9 April 2016, over thirteen hundred people converged on the Jenin refugee camp in the northern West Bank. They arrived from across the occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem and Israel, and as far afield as Europe and the United States. Most, if not all, had travelled for hours, taking long and tortuous routes across Palestine in order to cross Israeli-imposed checkpoints and avoid road closures. Despite these conditions, however, they had arrived to celebrate the tenth anniversary of The Freedom Theatre, a five-day festival of theatre, dance and circus performances, acting workshops, a visual arts exhibition, film screenings, music and poetry performances, and stand-up comedy. As well as reprising one of its own productions, the theatre invited other Palestinian companies and individual performers to present their own works. Parallel to these events, the theatre also organized a âforum on cultural resistance,â the first of its kind to be held anywhere in Palestine.1 Whereas performances took place either in the theatre or the public square, forum sessions were spread out between the community centre, the womenâs centre and the popular committee building (all in the refugee camp). Forum lectures ranged from âwomen, theatre and resistanceâ and âart under occupationâ to âculture confronting occupationâ and the cultural boycott model. These lectures were followed by small group discussions during which participants could chew over the issues and ideas raised by the speakers and then feed their responses back to the forum. The participants came from a broad range of backgrounds. As well as the general public, some of them were local politicians and community workers; others were academics, political activists, and performers and actors. Yet, despite their diverse backgrounds and political positions, all of the participants agreed on one thing: the centrality of Palestinian cultural works, and theatre specifically, in resisting Israeli settler-colonialism.
For Western readers, it might seem bizarre that a theatre company would spearhead public discussions on resistance of any kind let alone resistance to the Israeli state. After all, much theatre programming in London, Berlin or New York, for example, has precious little to do with mobilizing audiences along political lines. In fact, argues Christopher Balme, as Western theatres have transitioned over the last few centuries from places of unruly gatherings to sites of art, entertainment and quiet contemplation, they have lost their âpublicnessâ: the theatres Western audiences usually attend are essentially private spaces (Balme 2014, 3). In contrast, though, it is not uncommon to hear Palestinian theatre-makers argue that their theatres are not just âpublicâ spaces but, more importantly, they play a crucial role in the âpublic sphereâ itself. In other words, Palestinian theatre is not, simply, that which comments on the political affairs of the day. Rather, they insist, Palestinian theatre plays an active part in the broader project of Palestinian national liberation by contesting Zionist discourse, spotlighting Israeli state practices and reclaiming the very narrative on Palestine itself.
Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank attempts to unpack that claim. On the one hand, it narrates a history of Palestinian theatre in the West Bank since the first intifada (1987â93) to the present day in order to discuss the ways in which theatre-makers resist ongoing processes of colonial abjection. On the other hand, it argues for the important role Palestinian theatre and theatre-makers play in the formation of what I call an abject counterpublic . I shall explain what I mean by these terms in the relevant sections of this chapter, but the point here is that, throughout this book, I have been interested in the range of tactics theatre-makers use to âtalk backâ to and bypass dominant power relations which direct or obstruct what is produced on the ground. What tactics, I ask, do theatre-makers use to disrupt, subvert and bypass the Zionist public sphere? What counter-discourse emerges from this site? How is such a counter-discourse articulated in performance spaces? And how does theatre, in the logistical sense, work against a dominant discourse of erasure as well as continue to operate under conditions of colonialism and occupation? The historical development of Palestinian theatre presents us with an account of abjection both as a lived social process and as a political praxis by which theatre-makers, like other Palestinians, are subject to Israeli control but through which they contest, resist and reconfigure their abject subjectification. In such ways, this book argues, Palestinian theatre has played an integral role in the formation of an abject counterpublic, a physical and performative space in which Zionism and its effects come face to face with their discontents.
Abject Subjects
In her book Revolting Subjects, Imogen Tyler develops a theory of abjection as a lived social process embodying practices of power, subjugation and resistance in contemporary Britain (Tyler 2013, 4). Central to her thesis is the figure of the ârevolting subjectâ who is constituted in material and discursive practices as the social and political âabject.â According to Tyler, social abjection refers to the condition in which certain subjects are excluded from society as âhuman wasteâ (ibid., 27) and âleech-like bodiesâ (ibid., 46) that both rob the state of its vital resources and infect the national body. Her theory identifies âa constellation of embodied practicesâ (ibid.) that is implemented in order to achieve a âdisgust consensusâ (ibid., 23) enabling the scapegoating of those constituted as ânational abjectsâ (ibid., 9). In addition, the manipulation of knowledge and media representations of such groupsâfor example, white, working-class, âantisocialâ youths (or âchavsâ), im-/migrants and asylum seekers (especially Muslims), Gypsies and Travellers, the 2011 rioters, and disability activists (Tylerâs case studies)âprovide the justificatory logic needed by the state to manufacture consensus and consent for a range of pernicious and punitive measures for the sake of what it identifies as the nationâs hygiene (ibid., 38).
Underpinning Tylerâs theory is her compelling problematization of Julia Kristevaâs (1982) notion of abjection, which she extends (via Georges Bataille, Frantz Fanon, Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler) in order to argue that âabjection is [âŚ] a mechanism of governance through aversion, which in Butlerâs terms might be queered through alternative citational practicesâ (Tyler 2013, 37, original emphasis). The first part of Tylerâs proposition, that abjection is âa mechanism of governance,â is familiar ground for anyone aware of the classed and racialized aversion and disgust that manifest in, for example, the then French president Nicolas Sarkozyâs vow to use a Karcher, a high-pressure waterblast used to peel away encrusted dirt, to cleanse the Parisian ghettos of racailles (variously translated as scum and thugs) during the French riots of 2005, or the ââbroom-armyâ recruitsâ (ibid., 40) wearing T-shirts declaring that âlooters are scumâ (ibid., 181) during the London riots of 2011.
However, it is the second part of Tylerâs proposition, âthrough aversion,â namely the idea of the revolting subject, that demonstrates the double meaning in her terms. Tylerâs theory of social abjection, then, is about the revolt (or resistance) of those subjects whom the state constitutes and marginalizes as revolting (disgusting). By calling attention to the resistance emerging at these sites of abjection, Tyler reminds us of their limitations but also of their radical potential. At such sites, Tyler argues, national abjects draw upon their abject status in order to performatively assert a âdisidentificationâ with it whilst simultaneously embodying and introducing into public discourse alternative forms of âcommoningâ (Tyler 2013, 173, 124). Yet, she demonstrates the limitations of such practices owing to the persistence of consensus. Thus, for example, despite the London riots being an expression of outrage against inequality and police racism and brutality, their aesthetic representation in the media served as evidence of the political consensus. In other words, âthe rioters became the abjects they had been told they wereâ (ibid., 204).
Tylerâs theory of abjection also takes into consideration colonial and post-colonial practices. Following Anne McClintock (1995) and Frantz Fanon ([1961] 2001, [1952] 2008), she argues that âabjection is useful for mapping the mechanisms of imperialist power relationsâ (Tyler 2013, 35). For McClintock, abjection is both a characteristic of colonized peoples and the boundary zones âon the threshold of body and body politicâ to which they were excluded (McClintock 1995, 72). McClintock also draws attention to how abjection manifests as both spatialized and embodied processes of subjectification, distinct and yet interdependent. These processes, she argues, are revealed in âabject zonesâ (such as the occupied Palestinian territory), âagents of abjectionâ (such as Israeli soldiers and border police), âabjected groupsâ (such as Palestinians themselves), and âpolitical processes of abjectionâ (such as the mass removal of Palestinians during the Nakba and following the War of 1967) (ibid.).2
For Tyler, Fanonâs writing offers both a diagnostic of abjection and also a methodology for resisting abjectionality. In Black Skin, White Masks ([1952] 2008), Fanonâs anal...