Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (New Texts Out Now)

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (New Texts Out Now)

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (New Texts Out Now)

By : Mejdulene Bernard Shomali

Mejdulene Bernard ShomaliBetween Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press, 2023).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali (MBS): Toni Morrison said “if there is a book you want to read, and it is not yet written, then you must write it yourself.” I wanted a book that spoke to my experiences as a queer Palestinian woman. I wanted to situate myself in a community with other queer Arabs, to look for traces of our histories, and to imagine our futures. It was particularly important to me to keep banat (women, femmes, girls) Arab at the center of this study because so often in heteropatriarchal economies (both Arab and otherwise) desire between women—in fact, the very lives of women—are rendered at best uninteresting. Alternatively, women’s bodies might become a battle ground for Arab nationalisms or the object of Orientalist scopophilia. At worst, women’s stories and intimacies are repressed, undervalued, or disappeared. Between Banat narrates women’s stories and desires without apology and independently of a masculine referent. Finally, I wrote this book toward our freedom, choosing to highlight moments of potential and pleasure over and against the relentless assault on (Arab) women and queer peoples’ lives and freedoms. I wanted—still want—to imagine a future where we are OK, where we are free.

Between Banat seeks an elusive subject: queer Arab women, where each word in that triad is itself subject to multiple interpretations.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

MBS: The objects of this study include literature, art, and film produced by and about banat Arab and queer peoples. Between Banat takes as its central location “between”: desire between bodies, bodies between nations, nations between one another. Accordingly, the texts studied are produced in several languages and locations. For example, I look at Arabic and English language novels, transnational films, and multi-lingual comics as some sites where same-sex desire, challenges to normative sexualities, and critical political pedagogies emerge. In constructing this book, I approached the archive with curiosity: to what end is compiling a cache of queer Arab texts useful? To what extent might an archival project delimit the capaciousness of our sexualities? To what extent might a recuperative project impose names, ideas, or renditions that commit harm in the name of recognition? Because of these conflicting impulses, Between Banat maintains ambivalence and fluidity in its narration of its subjects. 

Between Banat also participates in many ongoing conversations: how to think transnationally about queer and Arab communities; how to resist anti-Arab racism and Orientalism; how to challenge gender and sexual normativity within Arab (and non-Arab) communities; and how to understand and articulate the sexualities that sit at the convergence of these competing and conflicting dialogues. Between Banat seeks an elusive subject: queer Arab women, where each word in that triad is itself subject to multiple interpretations. Accordingly, it spends a lot of time with transnational and Arab feminisms, queer and queer of color critique, and ethnic studies.

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MBS: My research has always concerned queer Arabs, banat in particular. I have also been interested in femininity and committed to multiple forms of queer freedom. The book is a crystallization of my thoughts about our community and our futures as I came to them over the past few years. In my poetry, I am also tracing concerns about queerness and femininity but situating them in a more personal, rather than scholarly, context. Though the book is transnational, my poetry more narrowly considers those questions in the context of Palestinian identity.

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MBS: I hope queer Arab peoples will read Between Banat and find it useful, even if that utility is only as a point of departure or contention. I hope this book is one of many that queer Arab women want to read, that rather than the somewhat sparse landscape I faced as a young queer scholar, there is this book, and hopefully many more to come. The greatest gift I have received in writing this book has been the moments where queer Arabs reach out to let me know they are reading it and that it is resonant to their experience of self. 

Between Banat was also deeply informed by queer and feminist work on/by Black, Indigenous, and people of color. I hope scholars in those fields see Arab studies as a rich and fecund ground for queer and feminist criticisms and view the book as a contribution to those conversations. Lastly, I hope scholars in Arab studies take seriously the promise and importance of centering queer voices. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MBS: Right now, I am thinking about forms of embodied and affective resistance in Palestine. I am interested in how practices of Palestinian resistance are gendered and sexed, and curious about the ways intimacy and pleasure are fundamental to Palestinian survival. There are so many places and spaces where Palestinians conjure pleasure, so many moments where our bodies alight with joy (for example, dancing at an impromptu sahra). Moments of pleasure can interrupt the pressure of the apartheid state. Of course, those moments do not override its violence or imagine a recess of suffering. Instead, sorrow and happiness operate in tension, and both leave bodily traces. My goal in this project is to think through those Palestinian embodiments and affects, and celebrate the importance of pleasure to our continued survival and resistance. 

J: Tell us something about the book that not many people know. 

MBS: A fun fact about Between Banat is that Arabic in the book appears in a font called “Scheherazade.” The first chapter of the book uses the figure of Scheherazade as an index of the competing discourses that foreclose representations of banat Arab and queers especially. When the designer shared style options including “Scheherazade,” I could not resist using it. It feels like a fun inside joke to me, a little wink to one of my arguments about Scheherazade’s endless enlistment by Arab and Arab diasporic artists.

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 5)

The concluding pages of the book, which are located in its fifth chapter, on sahq. Sahq is a medieval Arabic term that refers to same-sex acts between women. In the chapter I argue that sahq could be a useful description of queer Arab subjects as well as a direction for queer Arab praxis. 

 

I chose sahq as the concluding chapter of this monograph because it offers concrete strategies for imagining queer Arab futures. While the first chapter emphasized limiting discourses, the second recuperated queer pasts, and the third and fourth investigated our queer present, sahq envisions queers and their kin at the forefront of our new world. In this trajectory, the work of this book has been threefold: First, to outline the multiple discourses and obstacles that obfuscate queer Arab subjects, particularly banat, femmes, and women. For banat, the horizon of possibility is egregiously eclipsed by essentialisms and nationalisms that abject queerness from Arab culture, by ongoing Orientalist erasure of a mobile and shifting Arab culture, and by blatant anti-Arab, misogynist, and homophobic sentiment in the Arab world and its diaspora. Despite the discursive and material threats that impact queer Arab life, it persists. As such, the second aim of this book has been to catalogue how queer Arab life can be located in heteronormative spaces and how queer Arabs animate and narrate themselves. Between Banat creates a queer Arab archive from which to begin to ground our histories and present. The archive itself is ambivalent, fluid, and gestural, much as queer sexuality ap- pears in Arab cultures. Lastly, drawing on artists and creators who are both aware of the limiting discourses that frame queer Arab life and committed to representing it with joy and pleasure, the book offers sahq as the collection of the strategies and activisms necessary to hold and create a queer Arab future. 

With its emphasis on transnational collectivity, sahq asks us to radically decenter the self and imagine a collective accountable to one another. In the midst of the ongoing violence and erasure visited on queer Arabs, we can use sahq to grind against heteronormative and national violence, to survive, and to imagine otherwise. For queer Arab subjects who already face disproportionate patriarchal and state violence, the mere act of existence is a radical and stubborn activism that enables futurity. With its rejection of respectability and authenticity, sahq urges us to not volley for tolerance, homonormativity, or heteronational inclusion. Homonormativity should not be the goal toward which queer Arabs organize. Arab national projects will sacrifice queer lives over and over. Western perceptions of queer Arab life will not hold us in our complete subjectivity, but rather will be overdetermined by new and old Orientalist tropes designed to other Arabs and Arab queers. Rather, our capacity to live and experience pleasure and joy are bound to one another, even and especially across a transnational spectrum. Our capacities to love and live rest on strident and unwavering interruptions of heteronormativity and its attendant respectability politics. Our capacity to imagine an Arab identity that does not rely on heteronormative exclusions is precisely the capacity to imagine a queer Arab future at all. 

When we are stifled by limiting discourses, grow weary of the excavation process of our pasts, or continue to feel hemmed or unrepresented in the realities of right now, I suggest sahq can push us forward into a queer future. Following Muñoz, the future is itself a queer project. Queerness is the insistence of the potentiality of another world: a world in which queer Arabs not only survive but thrive. A world where Palestine is free. A world where we are at home in the world and the world is a home for us. In the face of receding horizons of possibility for minority subjects—in almost every nation-state is a nation that seeks to disappear us—the task of rewriting the future is an essential one. But as Muñoz reminds us, it is not an optimistic or simple endeavor. It is sahq, a grind, work. It is not easy to form and maintain transnational solidarity in an increasingly fractured and isolationist world order. It is not easy to free our bodies from the self-correction of respectability, and to reject visiting it upon others, when for so long it has seemed hopeful to strive for respect. It is disorienting (pun intended) to pursue our identities without recourse to authenticating measures, to imagine our lives and stories are enough without the erasure of others. Yet we can. The archive of work in this book, and the work of this book, are attempts to teach us how.

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.