Even Though I Walk Through the Darkest Valley, I Will Fear No Evil,Psalm 23:4: Walking as an Aesthetic form of Political Resistance in post-colonial..
Lead Research Organisation:
University of Cambridge
Department Name: Architecture
Abstract
..Landscapes
This PhD proposes to explore walking tours in the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel following the 1948 as a starting point for an examination of walking as political resistance. The central case study will be augmented by two additional cases. These will be the 2016 Ni Yetu walk in Kenya and the 'freedom walk' by refugees in Israel in 2013. The case studies are similar in their construction of counter-narratives in physical landscapes that seek to suppress and repress elements of the past or present. The difference between the case studies is the specific contemporary issue they remark on, such as the politics of race and racialization of space, penetration of borders in the globalised world, and post independent politics in Africa. The comparative approach allows for the theorisation of walking as method for interventions within post-colonial sites that reveals the lingering effects of political and spatial arrangement of colonialism today. My hypothesis is that the similarities between the cases will allow for the framing of walks as an important tool for marginalised groups. The primary research questions concern the practice of aesthetic-political walks, how it effects the participants of the walks, those observing it, and the overall socio-political context within which they occur. It will explore how walks produce new knowledge and understandings about unresolved histories of racial and ethnic oppression.
This PhD proposes to explore walking tours in the ruins of Palestinian villages destroyed by Israel following the 1948 as a starting point for an examination of walking as political resistance. The central case study will be augmented by two additional cases. These will be the 2016 Ni Yetu walk in Kenya and the 'freedom walk' by refugees in Israel in 2013. The case studies are similar in their construction of counter-narratives in physical landscapes that seek to suppress and repress elements of the past or present. The difference between the case studies is the specific contemporary issue they remark on, such as the politics of race and racialization of space, penetration of borders in the globalised world, and post independent politics in Africa. The comparative approach allows for the theorisation of walking as method for interventions within post-colonial sites that reveals the lingering effects of political and spatial arrangement of colonialism today. My hypothesis is that the similarities between the cases will allow for the framing of walks as an important tool for marginalised groups. The primary research questions concern the practice of aesthetic-political walks, how it effects the participants of the walks, those observing it, and the overall socio-political context within which they occur. It will explore how walks produce new knowledge and understandings about unresolved histories of racial and ethnic oppression.
Organisations
Studentship Projects
| Project Reference | Relationship | Related To | Start | End | Student Name |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ES/P000738/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2027 | |||
| 1964592 | Studentship | ES/P000738/1 | 01/10/2017 | 30/09/2021 | Michal Huss |
| Description | This thesis argues that walking, a seemingly banal activity, can serve as a tactic of urban resistance and trans-cultural memory activism that makes visible a fact contemporary governments often ignore - the inherent diasporic nature of urban space. The PhD further provides insights into the ways the displaced are affected by and intervene within a city's public memory of past division and conflict (Berlin) and ongoing division and conflict (Jaffa-Tel Aviv). The story of Berlin represents a city currently united, having overcome historical division and war; in contrast, the story of the Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipality is of two contiguous cities, violently joined together following the 1948 war. Firstly, the PhD demonstrates how walking tours guided by Syrian and Iraqi refugees in Berlin use official memorials of German history to testify to refugees' more recent traumatic memories from countries ridden by war. Secondly it illustrates how tours of south Tel Aviv use the street with its everyday life memories and stories as a phenomenological pedagogy that demonstrates the complexity of African refugees' lives and their reception by the Israeli host community. As become evident, African refugees, a seemingly uninvolved third party (as neither Israeli nor Palestinian), are, nonetheless, impacted by and in turn affect the public memory of a city undergoing conflict. Thirdly, the discussion is advanced by analysing a site in ongoing direct memory clash, looking at how guided tours use ruins to resist the erasure of Palestinian memory in Jaffa. Key findings are: - Rather than focusing on refugees' experiences, the official discourse prompted by host states tends to shifts the focus to border control and national security (Yuval-Davis, 2006). The self-narrated stories presented in the tours challenge the Western discourse focus on borders and governmentality. Instead, it shifts the focus onto the in-between of the penetration of borders, the life before, the journey itself, and the difficulties of building a life in a new locality. - The tours are a significant example of how to form a materialised act of representation to represent the complex mnemonic connections refugees form to landscapes. The tours mark, through walking, refugees' resistance or coping strategies, or spatial and cultural creativity, and form a stage for refugees to interlace their traveling memories within the local public domain, in their own words. - This activism, the PhD demonstrates, mixes and references local, travelling and global memories to create opportunities for cultural recognition and interchange, and as such questions and re-frames dominant memory narratives. - Another Key finding it that the tours provide insight into how trans-cultural memory activism is entangled, on local and global scales, with multiple perspectives, asymmetries; and cross-referential, determined by political, cultural and financial systems. - The tours involve a mixture of touristic and protest walking styles. This expands the scope of activism by and for refugees beyond more familiar tactics such as activist arts and demonstrations (see for example: Ataç 2016; Monforte and Dufour 2013; Antosik-Parsons 2019; Rotas 2012; Kuftinec 2019). Nonetheless, this mixture also embodies a tension around the tours - between activism and a consumeristic, voyeuristic experience. This provides a border insight into the globalised trauma market of traveling memory. This market is shaped by economic, commercial, cultural, and political structures that hide, select, compare, enable or institutionalise the representations of different traumas. It further mixes tourism, commemoration, profit seeking, creativity and activism. - The thesis examines guided tours as a preformative memory mixing in cities that are deeply embedded in the globalised discourse of Holocaust commemoration - Tel Aviv-Jaffa and Berlin. The usage of the tactic of testimonies in all three case studies demonstrates a global multi-directional reading of the Holocaust and of its repertoire of commemorative preformative practices. Yet, as this PhD demonstrates, the tours' memory activism destabilises and inserts 'frictions' within established national and global readings of the Holocaust. In each city, the tours further subvert its landscape of official public memory, demonstrating its entanglement with memories from elsewhere, but also with other locally present-absent traumatic pasts, of a city formally divided by the Cold War and a city comprised of two cities violently joined together after the 1948 war. |
| Exploitation Route | - It provides insight into how activism might supplement direct interventions such as protests for refugees with a prolonged, intimate and deep interaction with the complex situation, in both the local and global context. - In contrast to common perceptions on refugees' invisibility, they constantly appear in political discourses, the media, and surveillance technologies that monitor their bodies and movements. These representations nonetheless abstract refugees since they rarely address their voices and perspectives and often construct the image of refugees as voiceless, nameless, and stripped of agency. Guided walking tours led by refugees as a means for those refugees to create a counter-politicized representation of their experience. - Broadly, my research hopes to contribute to the understanding of alternative, non-formal politics practiced by the marginalized and show the importance of space, architecture and the city to these type of politics. - The research also demonstrates the impotence of the body and space for education and activism. |
| Sectors | Communities and Social Services/Policy,Creative Economy,Leisure Activities, including Sports, Recreation and Tourism,Government, Democracy and Justice,Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections |
| Description | I have fed some of my key findings back to the NGO's I have been researching and I hope to do more of this in the future. |
| First Year Of Impact | 2017 |
| Sector | Education |
| Impact Types | Cultural,Societal |