Researching Palestine

Music in Conflict studies the complex relationship of musical culture to political life in Palestine-Israel, where conflict has both shaped and claimed the lives of Palestinians and Jews. In the context of the geography of violence that characterizes the conflict, borders and boundaries are material and social manifestations of the ways in which the production of knowledge is conditioned by political and structural violence. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape artistic production in this context are informed by profound imbalances of power and contingent exposure to violence. Viewing expressive culture as a potent site for understanding these dynamics, the book examines the politics of sound to show how music-making reflects and forms identities, and in the process, shapes communities.

Visioning Israel-Palestine strives to cultivate recognition of the part that cultural products have played in the duplication of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While this conflict is one of the longest-lasting struggles over land and human rights in recent history, politicians and the media have largely reduced it to a series of debates over historical facts and expressions of violence. Its persistence, however, has also led to the manufacture of cultural products that challenge understandings of the conflict as a fight between two distinct peoples unified against each other. The wide range of international contributors to the volume analyse the content of such products alongside the work that they do within Israel-Palestine and in the Jewish and Palestinian diasporas.

In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.

Despite political upheavals under Muslim domination in the Middle Ages, Palestine was a center of great artistic activity recognized for its incredible dynamism. Its unique contribution to the Islamic "macrocosm," however, never became the subject of extensive study. Numerous archeological excavations on this relatively small geographic area reveal the existence of extremely well preserved monuments of high architectural quality and exceptional religious value. This is what Myriam Rosen-Ayalon exposes in this thorough introduction to Palestinian Islamic art and archeology. In chronological order she presents here for the first time the multifaceted and long-lasting achievements of Islamic art in Palestine, filling the gap of years of neglect on the subject.

Art in Palestine is part of the liberation struggle. In her book Liberation Art of Palestine, Samia A. Halaby puts this art in context, explains its symbols, development and historical roots, and gives important insights into one of the conflicts shaking the world today.

The Origins of Palestinian Art provides the most comprehensive survey of contemporary Palestinian art to date. The development of contemporary practice, theory and criticism is understood as integral to the concomitant construction of Palestinian national identities. In particular the bookexplores the intricate relationship between art and nationalism in which the idea of origin plays an important and problematic role. The book deconstructs the existing narratives of the history of Palestinian art, which search for its origins in the 19th century, and argues that Palestinian contemporary art demonstrates pluralistic, politically and philosophically complex attitudes towards identity and nation that confound familiar narratives of origin and belonging. The book builds upon theories of art, nationalism and post-colonialism particularly in relation to the themes of fragmentation and dispersal.

Palestinian Traditional Pottery stands out, first and foremost, as a scholarly testimony to the disappeared and disappearing craft of traditional pottery making by Palestinian women and men potters. It offers a contribution that has been long awaited and is long overdue. The material it provides, both textual and pictorial, is based on field research completed in the 1970s by two very different, yet complementary, researchers and authors.

Dance in Palestine has a history as complex and contentious as the land itself. Whether dismissed as bacchantic madness by Bible tourists in the 19th Century, revived and glorified by Zionists, Pan-Arabists and Palestinian Nationalists in the 20th Century, or rejected by Islamic Reformists in the 21st Century, dance in Palestine has a rich and elusive story that remains to be told. 'Raising Dust' traces one dancer's journey into Palestine's past and present. Through historical archives, the memories of dancers of yesteryear and into today's vibrant performing arts scene, Nicholas Rowe shows how dance has acted as a barometer of social change, a forum for debate and a means of expressing forbidden ideas. Far from apolitical, this most physical of art forms has often defined the political mood of the day. Sumptuously illustrated, the author provides a unique, rare and compelling cultural history of dance in Palestine.