Chiara De Cesari

Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

In recent decades, Palestinian heritage organizations have launched numerous urban regeneration and museum projects across the West Bank in response to the enduring Israeli occupation. The author examines these Palestinian heritage projects and the transnational actors, practices, and material sites they mobilize to create new institutions in the absence of a sovereign state.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 288
• Erscheinungstermin: 24. September 2019
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 226mm x 152mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 476g
• ISBN-13: 9781503609389
• ISBN-10: 1503609383
• Artikelnr.: 53540480

Autorenporträt

Chiara De Cesari is Senior Lecturer of European Studies and Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction: The Stakes of Heritage and the Politics of Culture
chapter abstract
The introduction opens with the story of the Palestinian heritage
organization rehabilitating the occupied and colonized Old City of Hebron.
This story encapsulates many facets of the book, particularly the
relationship between heritage making and Palestinians laying claims to
sovereignty (that is, resisting colonization) and instantiating
provisional, improvised, resourceful forms of government. It lays out the
key argument of the book that Palestinian heritage has transformed from a
practice of resistance into a mode of "governing" the Palestinian landscape
and society that is deeply connected to transnational regimes of
development and a precarious if resourceful process of state building in
the absence of a sovereign state. Finally, the introduction outlines the
book's key theoretical concerns: how heritage functions in mutating
colonial formations and as a form of anticolonial governmentality beyond
the nation-state as well as the work of heritage as expanding transnational
framework of practices and meanings.
1A Political History of Palestinian Heritage
chapter abstract
Chapter 1 examines the history of heritage preservation in Palestine in the
20th century. It begins with the work of Palestinian orientalists and
ethnographers under the British Mandate in the 1920s and 1930s, to analyze
how they rework colonial science in the spirit of a nascent Palestinian
cultural nationalism. It then focuses on the Folklore Movement of the 1970s
and 1980s and particularly its connection to the national liberation
movement and the women's movement as well as its practice of anticolonial
resistance and activist preservation in the occupied territories.
2Government Through Heritage in Old Hebron
chapter abstract
Chapter 2 discusses the project of historic conservation and urban
revitalization in the Old City of Hebron, which remained under Israeli
control after the Oslo Accords because of the presence of several Jewish
settlements. The chapter explores informal governmentalities through
heritage. Countering the settlers' takeover of the Old City, the Hebron
Rehabilitation Committee has restored and repopulated a large part of the
city's dilapidated central quarters. But in order to sustain livelihoods in
difficult conditions, it has begun to work on socioeconomic development
through a broad set of interventions, adopting the language and practices
of international development. Over the years, with the Palestinian
Authority not being able to work in the occupied Old City, the Hebron
Rehabilitation Committee has come to function as a hybrid institution of
local government.
3Heritage, NGOs, and State Making
chapter abstract
Chapter 3 examines the state-building role of heritage NGOs and the complex
relationship between these organizations and the heritage body of the
Palestinian Authority (PA). It argues that the Palestinian heritage
movement or "heritage by NGOs" helps create and sustain not only icons and
rituals of cultural nationalism but also a national infrastructure of
heritage preservation and a set of national institutions alternative to
those of the PA, like inventories, heritage units, master plans, and laws.
In addition to preserving Palestinian identity and reclaiming Palestinian
lands, West Bank organizations wish to ameliorate the living conditions of
historic districts' residents and villagers and so intervene in the spaces
and habits of their everyday life. In so doing-and in the context of the
PA's structural weakness-they experiment with a range of modes of planning
and governance, and enact a form of resourceful statecraft from the margins
of the state.
4Palestinian National Museums Post-Oslo
chapter abstract
Placing heritage initiatives in the context of a broader cultural revival
in the West Bank, Chapter 4 discusses the peculiar history of post-Oslo
museums; if the Palestinian Authority has failed to create a major national
museum-as a key institution of national representation-also due to a
fundamental lack of objects and museum collections, Palestinian artists and
cultural producers have instead experimented with different museum formats,
creating virtual museums and nomadic museums in exile, thus producing
creative national institutions in transnational spaces. These alternative
museums walk a tightrope between establishing authority (as
institutionality, as rules and regulations, as an authoritative museum
voice) and challenging such authority to promote radical, democratic
practices.
Conclusion: Cultural Governmentality and Activist Statehood
chapter abstract
The conclusion opens with an examination of the Islamic Movement and
Palestinian activist preservation in Israel targeting the remains of the
Palestinian villages depopulated in 1948 when the Israeli state was
established. It compares this heritage work with the work of Palestinian
NGOs in the West Bank, which have moved toward development and institution
building, or a kind of activist statehood. The conclusion then makes an
argument for the relevance of new forms of cultural governmentality and
heritage-led development well beyond Palestine.