Ruins, Resistance, and Pluritemporality in Palestine-Israel

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Abstract

In Palestine-Israel, cultural resistance has provided a mechanism of protest and remembrance through restoration, music, dance and street theatre. Working on two levels, cultural resistance symbolically ‘restores life’ to the formerly inhabited spaces by bringing artists, activists, and former residents to the sites. In a tangible sense, the restoration of heritage sites across the West Bank and Gaza by organisations such as RIWAQ, locates restoration in the realm of political archaeology, as the ruins become sites of contestation, as well as noueds de mémoire. This chapter will consider the role of performance as a mechanism of resistance in the depopulated West Bank towns of Kufr Bir’im and Iqrit, as well as the ways that restoration presents a point of memorialisation, reflection, and communal commemoration. In doing so, it will revisit Halbwachs’ idea that history is a ‘dead memory’, by positing that the ‘organic’ relation is sustained through the presence of subsequent generations who keep history alive through formal and informal commemorations and celebrations. Lastly, the sites will be explored as clusters of political and cultural activism through the use of theatre and technology that draws on the past and present as an active form of resistance.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationTime and Temporality in Transitional and Post-Conflict Societies
EditorsNatascha Mueller-Hirth, Sandra Rios Oyola
PublisherRoutledge
ISBN (Print)9781138631366
Publication statusPublished - 2018

Publication series

NameRoutledge Advances in Sociology
PublisherRoutledge

Keywords

  • Palestine-Israel
  • conflict
  • sociology

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