Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982

Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982 considers the development of new aesthetic and philosophical currents in Palestinian art between the launch of the Palestinian Revolution in 1965 and its defeat in the Siege of Beirut in 1982. During this brief, tumultuous, and radically hopeful period, Palestinians in exile gained unprecedented agency over their fate, emblematized in the Beirut-based pseudo-state of the Palestine Liberation Organization. In the visual and literary arts, the dynamic, forward-looking optimism of the revolutionary moment wrestled with the ongoing traumas of exile, creating tension that materialized in the related figures of the dream and the maternal body. Placing established nationalist aesthetics in conversation with understudied imaginaries of fantasy and science-fiction, this dissertation traces the emergence of the “dream-state,” an extranationalist framework for conceptualizing Palestine that simultaneously indexes the nightmarish uncanny in its present and fosters multidirectional modes of anticipating its future. This framework marks Palestine’s difference from nations that exist in sovereign, territorialized form; Palestinians do not “imagine” the nation as a subconscious means of belonging to a community, but as a complex act of mourning, resistance, speculation, and survival. This dissertation looks primarily at the visual art of Samira Badran (b. 1954), Mustafa Hallaj (1938-2002), Juliana Seraphim (1934-2005), and Ismail Shammout (1930-2006). It also considers the work of visual artists Mona Saudi (1945-2022), Ibrahim Ghannam (1930-1984), Jumana Husseini (1932-2018), and Abdel Rahman Al-Muzayen (b. 1943), as well as literature by Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), Taha Muhammad Ali (1931-2011), Ghassan Kanafani (1936-1972), and Muzaffar al-Nawaab (b. 1934). Across the diverse artistic practices represented by these figures, the dream-state appears most clearly in different iterations of the female form that emphasize its reproductive capacity. Through these iterations––faithful surrogate, loving mother, barren monster, virgin territory––the maternal body articulates the dream-state’s tenacious futurity while indexing its patriarchal parameters. In considering the dream-state through and against its wombs, Mother Figure explores the gendered hopes and anxieties shaping new modes of imagining Palestine at a generative moment in decolonial history