UC San Diego

This dissertation is centered on mapping Early Modern and Late Modern (19th and 20th centuries) and contemporary traditions of Palestinian Sumūd (resistance/resilience/steadfastness) that have emerged from the historic struggle of Palestinian self-determination against settler colonial forces. The Palestinian Political Prisoner Movement (PPPM), Palestinian Resistance Music, transnational Political Prisoner Solidarity Movements, as well as Palestinian Resistance Literature and art are explored to understand the contemporary manifestation of these historically rooted resilient and now transnational traditions. Beginning with the Reformation periods in the late Ottoman rule of Palestine, the advent of British colonial prisons in Palestine, and later the continued enhancement of the settler-colonial prison and military-industrial complexes by Israel, this work looks to weave together a foundational narrative of how the Palestinian political prisoner's movement throughout these two occupations affected the development of the dynamic linguistic and practical traditions of Palestinian Sumūd. This research delves into how these traditions historically and presently function within a complex and multifaceted array of national and political ideologies expressed through various mediums of popular culture. Production, performance, and transmission of the cultural, intellectual, and political ideologies of Palestinian Sumūd actively bridge and circumvent the geographic and systemic enclosures that have scarred, segregated, entrapped, and over time destroyed the Palestinian landscape and its indigenous communities. The transnational transcendence of Palestinian Sumūd has taken the Palestinian ethos of resistance, life, and revolution transforming it into a praxis/epistemology/language of solidarity between differing worlds of intentions and differing indigenous and minority struggles. Palestinian Sumūd has, since the 1960s, been a material connection between transnational communities who understand that a collective global solidarity movement must come together in order to challenge the deeply genocidal global institutional rule and structure of Euro-American and Israeli white/ethno-supremacy, Zionism, colonial/necro-capitalism, patriarchy, and settler colonial societies, institutions and governing frameworks.