Martyrs and Markets: Exploring the Palestinian Visual Public Sphere

Haddad, Toufic

doi:10.1057/9781137539076_5

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 3 publications

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“…During the intermediary weeks between the discovery of Mohammed's remains and his murderers’ confession, Israeli and Palestinian publics latched onto Mohammed's photos as intimate touchstones for comprehending why this boy had been killed. Images have long offered Palestinians a social and aesthetic avenue for communicating their political concerns, whether it be attempts to air their collective grievances to a global audience by representing their bare suffering (Allen 2009) or to paper Palestinian streets with images of martyrs as a local act of “supporting the families of those who were killed by the Israeli occupation” (Allen 2006, 108), instilling resistance and “a fundamental rejection of the [occupation's] status quo” (Haddad 2015, 96). Nowadays, however, Palestinians are not the chief producers or consumers of such aesthetic forms about Palestinian martyrs; digital images are subject to global consumption and its social and discursive effects, inviting captions, judgments, and resignifications from onlookers across the world.…”

Section: The Stuff Of Humanitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On the one hand, this couple embodied histories of Palestinian perseverance in the face of recurrent and recent disaster, even as cynicism and pessimism are increasing hallmarks of the Palestinian condition (Allen 2013). “The conceptualization of the martyr, and the very act of commemorating him/her through producing a martyr poster emerged as a way for national movement actors to defy the Israeli psychological and practical attempt at eliciting Palestinian submission” (Haddad 2015, 107). On the other hand, Mohammed's images were traveling across the world, not cordoned off to Palestinian streets and interpretations, as had been the case for martyrs in years past.…”

Section: Meeting Mohammedmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

Silver

2021

American Anthropologist

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On July 2, 2014, a Palestinian teenager, Mohammed Abu Khdeir, was brutally killed. Although his murderers eventually confessed, the month following Mohammed's death was full of indecision about the crime and its perpetrators. During this period, Israeli and Palestinian publics latched onto Mohammed's selfies as intimate touchstones for comprehending who he was, what led to his death, and what subsequent action should be taken. This archive of images, however, inspired different understandings of Mohammed; among Israelis and Palestinians, conflictual voices emerged from the same pictures, making incompatible testimonials about Mohammed's identity and his victimhood. Central to the politics surrounding Mohammed's death were how such personal modes of perception—hearing him, seeing him, sensing him—inspired and legitimated radically different political claims and ambitions. Pausing on the ways that individuals grasped Mohammed in his images, in this article I unravel the cultural genealogies and social affordances that affected Israeli and Palestinian forms of visual apprehension. I argue that the most seemingly mundane moments of individual encounter—when Israelis and Palestinians caught sight of Mohammed at everyday digital interfaces—substantially inflected political landscapes and the contours of social understanding, laying the groundwork for further conflicts, including Israel's 2014 invasion of Gaza that occurred a month after his death. [death and dying, mediation, visuality, sexuality, Israel/Palestine]

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Section: The Stuff Of Humanitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Meeting Mohammedmentioning

confidence: 99%

Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

Silver

2021

American Anthropologist

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“…2. The nationalist and secularist acceptation of martyrdom has largely been examined in other societies of North-Africa and West-Asia (Mayeur-Jaouen 2002;Chaib 2007;Haddad 2016). Comparative studies are nevertheless missing, although they could be useful to show similarities and to undermine the conventional idea that martyrdom is "somehow more central to Arab or Muslim cultures than others" (Hayoun 2012).…”

Section: Endnotesmentioning

confidence: 99%

National Memory in the Making: Gendered Re-Configurations of Martyrdom in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

Lachenal¹

2020

Re-Configurations

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Zusammenfassung Treating the category of “martyr” as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines, this chapter examines how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by examining governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally define who could benefit from official recognition as a martyr. It then unpacks the differences in definitions of “martyrdom” between official institutions and families of the deceased, arguing that “martyr” is a moral category, the boundaries of which are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. The chapter goes on to demonstrate how the category of “martyrs of the nation” has progressively overshadowed the category of “martyrs of the revolution” in official memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian ones.

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Fake Martyrs and True Heroes. Competitive Narratives and Hierarchized Masculinities in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

Lachenal

2019

Men and Masculinities

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Treating the category “martyr” as socially constructed and contested along gendered and political lines, this paper examines how heroes and martyrs have been produced and deployed in post-revolutionary Tunisia. It begins by examining governmental attempts, launched soon after the revolution, to monopolize and institutionally define who could benefit from official recognition as a martyr. The differences in the definition of “martyrdom” between official institutions and families of the deceased are unpacked, arguing that “martyr” is a moral category, the boundaries of which are often drawn in terms of differing masculinities. The paper goes on to demonstrate how the category of “martyrs of the nation” has progressively overshadowed the category of “martyrs of the revolution” in official memorial practices, as the commemoration of the revolution has progressively focused on its uniformed victims, leaving out the civilian ones. One of the interesting features of this shift is that it demonstrates the malleability of the way the category “violence” is understood and deployed. The paper thus shows how neither state officials nor the families of deceased officers, activists, or bystanders accepted that it was sufficient simply to have died during the upheaval in order to be recognized as a martyr. All applied additional moral and political criteria in order to determine who deserved to be labelled as a martyr. At stake in these debates were contrasting representations of masculinity, in particular between triumphant, militaristic masculinities and fragile and damaged masculinities. As the figure of the uniformed “hero” has become increasingly consolidated and hegemonic in post-revolutionary Tunisia, the term “martyr” itself has been increasingly appropriated by state institutions and official memorial practices that serve to reaffirm order and governmental power.

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Martyrs and Markets: Exploring the Palestinian Visual Public Sphere

Cited by 4 publications

References 3 publications

Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

Familiar Pixels: Imag(in)ing the Dead and the Political in Israel/Palestine

National Memory in the Making: Gendered Re-Configurations of Martyrdom in Post-revolutionary Tunisia

Fake Martyrs and True Heroes. Competitive Narratives and Hierarchized Masculinities in Post-Revolutionary Tunisia

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