Poetics of resistance : object, word and image in the literatures and visual arts of Iraq and Palestine

• Main Author: Aldabbagh, Siba
• Published: SOAS, University of London 2017
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.736624

The relationships between 'states' are no longer based on notions of national sovereignty, but rather on interconnected networks of continuous and porous circulations. The visual arts and literatures of the new globalising world must now be understood in light of this new reality. They breach by now out-dated models informing our understandings of word, image and object, and transgress the boundaries of established literary and artistic traditions. The visual artists and writers studied are today creatively fashioning a new vision for their respective societies. Through positive engagement and active resistance, their practices and artistic products embody new relationships with the new global order of power and cultural politics. Resisting both the projected new global order and the old national priorities, their works represent new aesthetics that bring their works into the twenty-first century. This thesis examines comparatively the literary writings and works of visual art from the two decades at the turn of the twenty-first century by carefully chosen Iraqis and Palestinians and locates their new aesthetics in their response and resistance to globalisation. It focuses, through their engagement with 'attendant memory games', on the intricate ways these writers and visual artists challenge various political and cultural power structures, old and new, without necessarily abandoning their commitments. Material objects, word and image serve as potent sites where new memories may be developed and legacies alternative norms formulated and circulated. Despite the continuous displacement and relocation of traditional aesthetic and epistemological paradigms by these contemporary creative figures, 'memory' - a combination of collective and individual - is a site of rivalry between those who want to hold on to old power structures, and those seeking new ways of strengthening social solidarity through inclusion and pluralism.