Najat Rahman

How may the diasporic “inform/disrupt” ideas of the national? (Butler 2010) What does it mean to articulate a belonging in diasporic forms and conditions? To trace the influence of the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, long deemed a “national poet” and one who so poignantly expresses a loss of home, to diasporic artworks that often evoke this poetry directly and yet which are “at home and in the world” demand a thinking of “belonging without the conditions of belonging,” as Giorgio Agamben has argued. (1993) Could “dislocations felt by displaced subjects towards disrupted histories and to shifting and transient national identities” constitute this belonging? (Rogoff 2000)

My proposed research aims to produce a theoretical and interdisciplinary analysis of the aesthetics and politics of Palestinian diasporic cultural production in the last two decades in light of its significant presence on the international scene, and following on the heels of the immense influence of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry that had dominated Palestinian culture for decades. The 1990’s have heralded a new period of creativity in the wake of the Oslo Accords, and “as a result of the decentralization of the Palestinian political scene.” (Pappé 2005) It traces the influence of Darwish’s poetry in language, lyric, performative and visual art forms.

The evocations of Darwish’s poetry by artists from spoken word poets such as Suheir Hammad to visual artists such as Eman Haram, has necessitated an approach that addresses poetry’s relation to other arts, and the transformation not only of what is ‘national’ through this diasporic art but the distinct boundaries of those forms, where the poetry of Suheir Hammad beckons that of Darwish in a language composed of Arabic and English, in written poems also performed as slam poetry. The artworks call for an approach that is multilingual and intermedial, a new comparative literature as Emily Apter has proposed. (2006) The multi-media demands of the project are both innovative and challenging not only because one is working across different media but rather because each work already seems to be multi-medial and therefore demands a new approach. This is an art that privileges the medium, where different art media are combined to create innovative and hybrid forms, often highlighting the fluid boundaries between literary production and other modes of artistic creativity (particularly poetry’s relation to film, video, and performance art).

This project aims at rethinking the national through the diasporic, theorizing the multilingual through the intermedial that the diasporic also has spawned, and examining the relationship between aesthetics and politics in these artworks in light of the theoretical contribution of Jacques Rancière (2010).