One Thousand and One Words: Contextualizing Diasporic Visual Practices Through a Lens of Comparative Analysis of Palestinian Literature

Can literary analysis offer an alternative critical framework for visual art? Can global literary traditions’ long history of addressing politics of translation, of exile, and of resistance offer thoughtful case studies and viable contemporaries to visual practices? Furthermore, can comparative literature offer a generative point of departure for a visual practice, redefining its context as it dips into multimodal creative production? A paper presentation and performance-lecture, this talk contextualizes a visual practice through a lens of comparative analysis of the poetic output of Palestine and its diaspora. It proposes a new poetics of resistance, redefined by contemporary poets, as a context with which visual art can be in conversation. The talk will introduce literature of resistance as defined in relation to literature of exile in 1966 by Ghassan Kanafani, a novelist, critic, and political activist. A close reading of a 2014 poem by Mai Al-Sayegh, a female contemporary of Kanafani, is presented as a case study for a more feminine, complex, and non-mutually-exclusive definition of exile/resistance. The talk will showcase sculptural and performative investigations of literary elements, such as oral poetry and chants being the genesis of Palestinian literature of resistance, and melancholia and the optics of translation as defining characteristics of the literature of exile. These explorations make up the presenter’s studio practice, a multimodal interrogation of the body’s relationship to language, and language’s relationship to notions of belonging.