Geographies of cultural boycotts for a free Palestine

Keywords: Settler colonialism, capitalism, arts, boycott
Abstract Type: Paper Abstract

Abstract

Practices of boycott have been central to anti-colonial liberation movements. Since the 2005 call for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions by Palestinian civil society organizations, boycott has taken different shapes and forms. In particular, the call for a cultural boycott of the Israeli state has been the site for debate, particularly with regard to its implications for the Palestinian cultural scenes. The BDS Movement makes a distinction in how its call is applied across different Palestinian geographies. In particular, it distinguishes between the ‘48 Palestinians (those living within the territories Israel occupied in 1948) and ‘67 Palestinians (those living within territories occupied in 1967). While the boycott allows artists from the Arab World to perform in the West Bank, it sees the entry by the same artists into the ‘48 territories as ‘normalization’ with the settler state.

Drawing on interviews with Palestinian artists and activists as well as archival materials, this paper conceptualises the boycott as a grounded socio-spatial practice. Inspired by Gramsci’s methodological formulations on consent, coercion, and political and civil society, the paper theorises boycotts as an arena of elaboration for an embodied spatialization of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. It thinks with Stuart Hall and his expansion of Gramsci’s formulations to make sense of notions of cultural resistance. The paper takes the boycotts as entry points into thinking about the contradictions generated by the interlinks between political economy, colonial politics of recognition, and anti-colonial resistance.