Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Aesthetic Production
Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel, and the Politics of Aesthetic Production Nili Belkind Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree Of Doctor of Philosophy In the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2014 © 2014 Nili Belkind All Rights Reserved ABSTRACT Music in Conflict: Palestine, Israel and the Politics of Aesthetic Production Nili Belkind This is an ethnographic study of the fraught and complex cultural politics of music making in Palestine-Israel in the context of the post-Oslo era. I examine the politics of sound and the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, and also, contextualize political action. Ethical and aesthetic positions that shape contemporary artistic production in Israel-Palestine are informed by profound imbalances of power between the State (Israel), the stateless (Palestinians of the occupied Palestinian territories), the complex positioning of Israel’s Palestinian minority, and contingent exposure to ongoing political violence. Cultural production in this period is also profoundly informed by highly polarized sentiments and retreat from the expressive modes of relationality that accompanied the 1990s peace process, strategic shifts in the Palestinian struggle for liberation, which is increasingly taking place on the world stage through diplomatic and cultural work, and the conceptual life and currency Palestine has gained as an entity deserving of statehood around the world. The ethnography attends to how the conflict is lived and expressed, musically and discursively, in both Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories (oPt) of the West Bank, encompassing different sites, institutions and individuals. I examine the ways in which music making and attached discourses reflect and constitute identities, with the understanding that musical culture is a sphere in which power and hegemony are asserted, negotiated and resisted through shifting relations between and within different groups.
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