Abstract
Since the early twentieth century, the Palestinian landscape has passed through social, political, and economic changes that have brought displacement, the fall of old towns, and the rise of new ones. This chapter reflects on the extent to which the landscape provides a medium to address resistance, as well as commemoration, in the absence of the villages and their inhabitants. To do this, the chapter looks at how gendered representations of the land have shifted since 1948 to the present day with reference to the works of Sophie Halaby (1906–1998), Tamam Al-Akhal (1935–), Mona Hatoum (1952–), Emily Jacir (1970–), and Sama Alshaibi (1973–). In doing so, it traces the movement from the inferred gendering of the land through vistas devoid of people, to the recurrent image of Palestinian womanhood, and finally, the tangible female body as represented through photography and audio-visual pieces.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
For a deeper consideration of the events at Deir Yassin and Al-Dawayima, see Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land Since 1948, by Meron Benvenisti (Berkeley, Los Angeles; London: University of California Press) 2000, and Remembering Deir Yassin: The Future of Israel and Palestine, edited by Daniel McGowan and Marc H. Ellis (New York: Olive Branch Press) 1998.
- 2.
See also Boaz Newmann, Land and Desire in Early Zionism (Lebanon: Brandeis), 2007.
References
Al-Akhal, T. (2003). Historical Turning Points That Affected My Life. Artist Statement. Birzeit Virtual Gallery. http://virtualgallery.birzeit.edu/p/ps?url=artistmonth/Alakhal/artiststatement. Accessed 1 Aug 2018.
Al-Qasim, S. (1987). From: After the Apocalypse. In S. K. Jayyusi (Ed.), Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology (pp. 381–384). New York: Columbia University Press.
Ali, T. M. (2007). So What: New and Selected Poems (With a Story) 1971–2005 (P. Cole, Y. Hijazi, & G. L. Tarset, Trans.). Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.
Alshaibi, S. (2004–2005). ‘Birthright’, Projects. http://www.samaalshaibi.com/Projects/Birthright. Accessed 20 Aug 2018.
Alshaibi, S. (2006). Memory Work in the Palestinian Diaspora. Frontier, 27(2), 30–53.
Antoni, J. (1998, April 1). Mona Hatoum. BOMB. https://bombmagazine.org/articles/mona-hatoum/. Accessed 20 Aug 2018.
Bajaj, K. (2015). Interview with Sama Alshaibi. Aesthetica, Posted: 12 June 2015. http://www.aestheticamagazine.com/interview-sama-alshaibi/. Accessed 12 June 2018.
Bal, M. (1999). ‘Introduction’. In M. Bal, J. Crewe, & L. Spitzer (Eds.), Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall and the Present. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England.
Bender, B. (1993). Landscape—Meaning and Action. In B. Bender (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence and Oxford: Berg.
Bell, D., & Holliday, R. (2001). Naked as Nature Intended. In J. Urry & P. Macnaghten (Eds.), Bodies of Nature. London: Sage.
Bennett, J. (2004). The Aesthetics of Sense-Memory: Theorising Trauma Through the Visual Arts. In K. Hodgkin, & S. Radstone (Eds.), Regimes of Memory (pp. 27–40). New York and London: Routledge.
Benvenisti, M. (2002). Sacred Landscape: The Buried History of the Holy Land since 1948. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
Best, S. (1995). Sexualizing Space. In E. Grosz & E. Probyn (Eds.), Sexy Bodies: The Strange Carnalities of Feminism. London and New York: Routledge.
Betterton, R. (1996). An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body. London and New York: Routledge.
Betterton, R. (2014). Maternal Bodies in the Visual Arts. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Boullata, K. (2009). Palestinian Art: 1850–2005. London: Saqi Books.
B’Tselem. (2018, July 3). Statistics on Punitive House Demolitions. https://www.btselem.org/punitive_demolitions/statistics. Accessed 17 Aug 2018.
Darwish, M. (2008). The Butterfly’s Burden (F. Joudeh, Trans.). Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books.
Genet, J. (2003). Prisoner of Love. New York: New York Review of Books.
Halaby, S. (2015). Sophie Halaby, Palestinian Artist of the Twentieth Century. Institute for Palestine Studies, 61, 84–100.
Hatoum, M. (1988). Measures of Distance. [Video, projection].
Helphand, K. I. (2005). “My Garden, My Bride” The Garden of My Sister, “The Song of Songs”. In J. Carubia, et al. (Eds.), Gender and Landscape: Renegotiating the Moral Landscape. London and New York: Routledge.
Hirsch, M. (1997). Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
ICAHD. (2018, August 4). Demolition and Displacement Report: July 2018. https://icahd.org/2018/08/04/demolition-and-displacement-report-july-2018/. Accessed 17 Aug 2018.
Jayawardane, N. M. (2014). Cartography Without Frontiers: The Body, the Border and the Desert in Sama Alshaibi’s Artwork. Contemporary Practices., 20, 142–159.
Jones, A. (2007). Memory and Material Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kristeva, J. (1985). Stabat Mater. Poetics Today, 6(1/2), 133–152. https://doi.org/10.2307/1772126.
Kristeva, J. (2014, February). Reliance, or Maternal Eroticism. Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 62(1), 69–85. https://doi.org/10.1177/0003065114522129.
Küchler, S. (1993). Landscape as Memory: The Mapping of Process and Its Representation in a Melanesian Society. In B. Bender (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives. Providence and Oxford: Berg.
Layoun, M. N. (2001). Wedded to the Land? Gender, Boundaries, and Nationalism in Crisis. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Lentin, R. (2006). Femina Sacra: Gendered Memory and Political Violence. Women Studies International Forum, 29, 463–473. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2006.07.004.
Malhi-Sherwell, T. (2001). Imaging Palestine as the Motherland. In T. Ben Zvi & Y. Lerer (Eds.), Self Portrait: Palestinian Women’s Art (pp. 166–158). Tel Aviv: Andalus Publishing and Tal Ben Zvi.
Mansoor, J. (2010). A Spectral Universality: Mona Hatoum’s Biopolitics of Abstraction. October, 133(Summer 2010), 49–74.
Mills, S. (2005). Gender and Colonial Space. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Mulvey, L. (2015, September). Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. Feminist Media Studies, 15(5), 881–884.
Nash, C. (2008). Reclaiming Vision: Looking at Landscape and the Body. In C. Johnson (Ed.), Culture and Society: Critical Essays in Human Geography, by N (pp. 65–87). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Olwig, K. (1993). Sexual Cosmology: Nation and Landscape at the Conceptual Interstices of Nature and Culture; or What Does Landscape Really Mean? In B. Bender (Ed.), Landscape: Politics and Perspectives (pp. 307–345). Berg: Providence and Oxford.
Olwig, K. (2002). Landscape, Nature, and the Body Politic: From Britain’s Renaissance to America’s New World. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press.
Rose, G. (1993). Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Said, E. (2011). The Art of Displacement: Mona Hatoum’s Logic of Irreconcilables. Quaderns de La Mediterrània, 15, 107–110.
Salti, R. (2010). From Resistance and Bearing Witness to the Power of the Fantastical: Icons and Symbols in Palestinian Poetry and Cinema. Third Text, 24(1), 39–52.
Sauer, C. O. (2007). ‘The Morphology of the Land’ (1925). In J. A. Wiens, M. R. Moss, M. G. Turner, & D. J. Mladenoff (Eds.), Foundation Papers in Landscape Ecology. New York: Columbia University Press.
Schulenberg, A. (2014). Mapping Palestinian Territories in Mona Hatoum’s Sculpture Present Tense. In J. Goudeau, M. Verhoeven, & W. Weijers (Eds.), The Imagined and Real Jerusalem in Art and Architecture. Leiden and Boston: Brill.
Tibawi, A. L. (1963). Visions of the Return: The Palestine Arab Refugees in Arabic Poetry and Art. Middle East Journal, 17(5), 507–526.
UNHCR. (2018). Israeli Settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem, and the Occupied Syrian Golan. In Report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, 26 February to March 6, 2018.
Urry, J. (2007), The Place of Emotions Within Place. In J. Davidson, L. Bondi, & M. Smith (Eds.), Emotional Geographies (pp. 77–87). Aldershot: Ashgate.
Van Alphen, E. (2006). Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory. Poetics Today, 27(2), 473–488. https://doi.org/10.1215/03335372-2005-015.
Vickroy, L. (2005). Seeking Symbolic Immortality: Visualizing Trauma in Cat’s Eye. Mosaic, 38(2), 129–143.
Wylie, J. (2009). Landscape, Absence and the Geographies of Love. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series, 34(3), 275–289. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2009.00351.x.
Yuval-Davis, N. (1997). Gender and Nation. London: Sage.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gandolfo, L. (2021). Absence, Gender, and the Land(Scape) in Palestinian Art. In: Otele, O., Gandolfo, L., Galai, Y. (eds) Post-Conflict Memorialization. Memory Politics and Transitional Justice. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-54887-2_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-54886-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-54887-2
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)