Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Aesthetic Production
[Thesis]
Nili Belkind
Washburne, Christopher J.
Columbia University
2014
411
Place of publication: United States, Ann Arbor; ISBN=978-1-321-03125-6
Ph.D.
Music
Columbia University
2014
This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complex cultural politics of music making in Palestine-Israel in the context of the post-Oslo era. I examine the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories), the complex positioning of Israel's Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. Cultural production in this period is also profoundly informed by highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process, strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomatic and cultural work, and the conceptual life and currency Palestine has gained as an entity deserving of statehood around the world.
Cultural anthropology; Music; Middle Eastern Studies
Social sciences;Communication and the arts;Coexistence;Conflict;Identity;Israel;Palestine;Resistance