‘To be creative is to exist’: rejecting resilience, enacting <i>Sumud</i> in the cultural resistance of ASHTAR theatre

This article draws from hundreds of interviews and conversations with survivors of wars and violence in different contexts to show the limits of resilience. I bring together stories from my experiences talking with survivors across many countries—including Palestine, South Africa, Northern Ireland, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Kingdom. Through employing ethnographic and autoethnographic methods, I argue that resilience expectations may impose supernatural coping mechanisms on communities struggling with adversities, romanticize them as exemplary in enduring injustices, obscure their humanity, and normalize (structural) violence they continue to experience or reduce its severity. I question who benefits from an overemphasis on and financing of resilience, especially within (international) development organizations. The communities I spoke with all contend that resilience is not just a useless word but also a discourse, a way of thinking, and a policy implemented during difficulties. They emphasize that the cheap (re)production of them as extraordinary people, who are expected to endure suffering, is violent because it places the onus on them to be resilient on issues beyond their control while, often, ignoring layers of (structural) violence and subsequent traumas they face. As an alternative discourse to resilience, I propose a collective and caring approach that deals with root causes of violence instead of ignoring them.

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Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation

Kayali

2024

Security Dialogue

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Palestinian women have envisioned and enacted resistance and resilience in different ways throughout the long-running Palestinian resistance movement. Strategies have ranged from direct collective actions to the resolute maintenance of everyday life in the face of ongoing occupation, settler-colonialism, displacement and violence. Palestinian women in the occupied West Bank have begun to develop tactics that attempt to negotiate a widespread aversion to ‘illegitimate’ and aid donor-prescribed actions, as well as to the gendered risks with which politically active women must contend. While this approach once encompassed the principle of resilience, recent times have seen the growing rejection of neoliberal resilience narratives in the belief that they normalize and entrench an oppressive status quo. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the West Bank, this article explores how women’s search for legitimate and feasible modes of resistance and resilience has generated tactics characterized by incrementalism, but which form part of a transformative social change strategy. In so doing, it reveals the dynamic ways in which women constantly renegotiate resistance to violence in Palestine. It also demonstrates how development models based upon neoliberal understandings of resilience exacerbate gendered impacts of insecurity while eroding women’s capacities to withstand them.

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‘To be creative is to exist’: rejecting resilience, enacting Sumud in the cultural resistance of ASHTAR theatre

Cited by 3 publications

References 15 publications

Community Theater and Resilience: The Case of the Greek Diasporic Community Theater in Brussels

Community Theater and Resilience: The Case of the Greek Diasporic Community Theater in Brussels

Beyond Expectations of Resilience: Towards a Language of Care

Transformative incrementalism: Palestinian women’s strategies of resistance and resilience amid gendered insecurity and neoliberal co-optation

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