UC Berkeley

This dissertation investigates aesthetic strategies of self-attenuation that Palestinian and Israeli writers and artists across the 20th and 21st centuries have mobilized to resist the foreclosure of a future comprising decolonization and equitable co-existence. In light of the current political impasse in Israel/Palestine, this project explores the vital importance of cultural production as a site of creative mediation, counter-history and survival, one that is itself constitutive of political fantasy and engagement. Using the rubric of what I term “aesthetic mechanisms of undoing,” I assemble a body of literary and artistic techniques that undermine and offset the forms of national, gender and religious identity undergirding the ethno-nationalist ideologies that have taken root in Israel/Palestine. Following the implicit poetics of the poets and artists examined in the ensuing chapters, I focus on the ways in which forms of weakened subjectivity enable innovative modes of otherwise inaccessible maneuverability—detailing how these makers locate creative force in the vulnerability, interruption, and mutability of self, rather than the advancement and expansion of power, self-knowledge or control.

Chapter 1 turns to two poets writing in Hebrew, tracing the impact of Rachel Bluwstein’s (1890-1931) poetics of exposure on Dahlia Ravikovitch’s (1936-2005) work. I track the composite poetic persona of Rachel (the poet and the biblical matriarch, traditionally figured as the mother of the nation) as she appears in several of Ravikovitch’s texts, arguing that she emerges as a site of matriarchal rewriting, through which the nation is transformed into a poetic collective that continually disassembles itself. Chapter 2 studies Palestinian artist Sliman Mansour (1947- ) and his 1997 series of life-size mud reliefs “I, Ismail,” a piece that probes the demise of patriarchal forms of authority. Mansour’s mud objects are overlaid by networks of fissures that he reinforces rather than smooths away. Arguing that the aesthetic attributes of cracking become the focus of Mansour’s work, which mirror the Oslo Accord’s effects and aftermath in Palestine, I read his decision to buttress and preserve the cracks to be a technique for abiding in the interstice of tradition and reinvention, where processes of decomposition may generate their own modes of authority. Chapter 3 centers on Mahmoud Darwish’s (1941-2008) 1995 collection Limādhā tarakta al-ḥiṣān waḥīdan? (Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?), claiming that the diwan narrates the process through which disinheritance from structures of patriarchy and political subjugation leads to the emancipatory cultivation of interstitial forms. I detail how the poems orchestrate destabilizing encounters between diverse voices, genres and registers and emphasize how the aural aspects of betweenness—echo, rhyme, rhythm—that Darwish privileges ultimately represent an alternative system of kinship and transmission. The introduction and final chapter offset the other sections’ focus on biblical and Qur’anic figures by examining the work of contemporary installation artists. The introduction addresses Khalad Jarrar’s (1976- ) series “Upcycle the Wall,” in which Jarrar cast molds of athletic equipment from the reconstituted cement that he chiseled from the West Bank Separation Barrier. Examining the ways in which Jarrar’s work showcases the agentic capacity and constraints of cultural production in Israel/Palestine—from border wall qua artistic medium, to objects of collective interplay qua cement basketballs—I discuss relations between art, politics and practices of self-attenuation in Israel/Palestine. Chapter 4 places in conversation two artists and their creative mobilizations of autobiography—Palestinian Emily Jacir (1970- ) and Etti Abergel (1960- ), a Jewish-Israeli woman artist of Moroccan descent. I claim that both Jacir and Abergel demonstrate a material engagement with the artifacts and narratives of crisis that enables them to engineer elastic nodes of indeterminacy within the circumstances that their projects address—the 1972 assassination of Palestinian Wael Zuaiter in Jacir’s case and the destruction and disjunctions of Nakba, Occupation and migration for Abergel. Taken together, these works illuminate a collective network of multimedia disruption that writers and artists in Israel/Palestine have embedded into their cultural imaginaries—a counter-imaginary of vulnerable and creative coexistence.