UB: Since you mention solidarity networks and the world community, how do you see the trans-local Palestinian condition connected to a larger global project articulating the struggle of other disenfranchised communities. Now that the peak of post-colonial critique has passed, how does the Palestinian cause fit within the wider picture at present?
BD: The Palestinians cause, long shelved under the decolonization sign is now increasingly viewed under the anti-globalization post-national sign. In the anti-globalization movement, the support for the Palestinian cause goes hand in hand with anti-war, anti-civilizational divides, anti-politics of fear, and anti-imperialist struggles. It is quite striking that almost anywhere one goes, one is certain to come across grassroots initiatives in solidarity with Palestinians. Thus, although the Palestinian situation is singular in many important respects, their experience has become deeply symbolic of the dark side of modernity: Foreign invasion and colonization, territorial partition, demographic displacement, and extraterritoriality. It is important not to lose sight, however, of the fundamental importance of statehood for Palestinians. Global elites can afford a transnational existence, but most Palestinians are poor, powerless, and in need of strong protection and services that only states can deliver. This is why the state/territory/peoplehood matrix still remains at the heart of the Palestinian political discourses at a time when the very concept of the nation-state as a form of political organization is being increasingly questioned.
UB: Cultural producer is perhaps the best term for what you are doing. It acknowledges the complexity involved in setting up this museum from the institutional web of financial and physical logistics, academic work, to the possibilities of display space. As a historian, how does it feel to slip in the role of cultural producer?
BD: “Slip” is too smooth a word for what is already a rough and tumble process that I have learned to approach with a great deal of humility. It is one thing to research and write, and quite another to construct a vision, mobilize around it, and then transform it into a complex institution. It is one thing to produce stories in the form of a heavily footnoted monograph that can only be consumed over days and weeks; and it is another to install, for instance, a multi-media narrative exhibit that imparts simple but powerful messages almost instantaneously. It is one thing to work alone in the archives, and quite another to manage teams of professionals in joint endeavors. It is one thing to own one’s voice (or at least the illusion of it) and quite another to have to calculate a path for institutional development through one of the most sensitive political minefields in the world.
UB: You describe a very interesting process here that makes me think of Walter Benjamin’s text “The Author as Producer” from 1934 where he argued that the role of the author and the artist is not just to respond to what is going on from a removed observational vantage point but, as a “producer,” to engage and actively change the course of social politics. This explains, perhaps, why in times of crisis, cultural producers turn to the collective model and engage in building institutional structures. As a scholar of cultural and social history you propose an institutional practice that presents authorship as a collective endeavor extending into other disciplines, notably contemporary cultural and art production. What do you see the role of art in preserving and articulating cultural memory?
BD: Works of art bear witness to the historic and societal contexts in which they are created, regardless of whether or not they actually comment on them. Thanks to art’s capacity of self-reflection it provides an essential interpretive framework for future possibilities for self-understanding and cultural identity within Palestinian or any other society.
Photo Caption:
“Beyond the young/old, traditional/modern motifs (which distract from the meaning of the photo), this picture evokes for me enigmas of the past, present, and future of the Palestinians. The gaze is forced to bounce and is unable to settle or anchor itself, and power of the unspoken is very apparent.”
Beshara Doumani, Old suq of Hebron, Summer 2006.
