Practices of boycott have been central to anti-colonial liberation movements and have taken a central role since the beginning of the unfolding genocide in Gaza. 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 settler 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 the territories Israel occupied in 1967). For example, while the boycott allows artists from the Arab World to perform in the West Bank, it has a more ambiguous answer on the entry by the same artists into the ‘48 territories. In other words, the boycott call sees a danger, or a trap, in the visas and permits issued to Arab artists by the settler state as such documents constitute subjective pathways for settler influence and colonial recognition politics.
Drawing on interviews with Palestinian artists and activists as well as archival and online materials, this paper takes a ‘relational comparison’ approach that situates cultural boycotts as locally-embedded practices. Inspired by Gramscian formulations on consent, coercion, and civil society, the paper theorises boycotts as an arena of elaboration for an embodied spatialization of anti-colonial and anti-capitalist resistance. Thinking with lessons from the South African calls for cultural boycotts in the 1970s and 1980s, it takes the boycotts as entry points into thinking about the interlinks between political economy, colonial politics of recognition, and anti-colonial resistance.
Hashem Abushama is an Associate Professor in Human Geography at the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil in Human Geography and an MSc in Refugee and Forced Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, and a BA in Peace and Global Studies from Earlham College in the United States. He is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Palestine Studies. He has authored several academic and journalistic articles on dispossession, arts, urbanization, the archives, and postcolonial Marxism; his writings have appeared in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, Refuge Journal, the Jerusalem Quarterly and the Oxford Journal of Refugee Studies. His essay a map without guarantees: Stuart Hall and Palestinian geographies won the inaugural Stuart Hall Essay Prize. In the summers of 2023-25, he is a EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien.
Alia Mossallam is a cultural historian, educator and writer interested in songs that tell stories and stories that tell of popular struggles behind the better-known events that shape world history. For her PhD she researched a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through the stories and experiences of the popular resistance in Port Said (1956) and Suez (1967-1974) and the construction of the Aswan High Dam through the experiences of its builders and the Nubian communities displaced by it. As a EUME Fellow 2017-21 of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation she worked on her book on the visual and musical archiving practices of the builders of the Aswan High Dam and the Nubian communities displaced by it. Her follow-up project at EUME (2021-24), Tracing Emancipation Under Rubbles of War, retrieves the physical and political journeys of Egyptian and North African workers on the various fronts of World War I through the songs and memoires that recount their struggles. Some of her research-based articles, essays and short-stories can be found in The Journal of Water History, The History Workshop Journal, the LSE Middle East Paper Series, Ma’azif, Bidayat, Mada Masr, Jadaliyya and 60 Pages. An experimentative pedagogue, she founded the site-specific public history project “Ihky ya Tarikh”, as well as having taught at the American University in Cairo, the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. she is now a lecturer at the Barenboim-Said Akademie and remains an associated EUME Fellow in 2024-25.
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