Refusing Silence: Mapping Cultural Resistance to Genocide

During such an unprecedented time of ongoing colonial violence and devastation in Gaza, Palestine, in the Congo, and in Sudan, Global Performance Studies (GPS) upholds its ethical and political position. As articulated in the editorial of the issue “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” (Hussein 2022), the journal firmly maintains the belief that “current understanding and engagements with decolonisation continue to be fundamentally flawed as long as the sovereignty of Palestinian land and Indigenous peoples around the world is not upheld, and as long as the settlers’ possession of stolen land is not relinquished.” As such, stating that “debates on decolonisation must go hand in hand with debates on Palestine and indigeneity” (Hussein 2022). The double issue “Decolonisation and Performance Studies” launched in December 2023, two days after the killing of Palestinian scholar Rifaat Alareer by an Israeli airstrike in northern Gaza.

GPS’s then co-editors, Felipe Cervera, Nesreen Hussein, and Theron Schmidt, felt the necessity to respond to such critical moment, and the responsibility to build on the questions and commitments that emerged from that issue, especially given the understanding of decolonisation as that which is closely tied to upholding the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples, including in Palestine. Visioning the issue extended the journal’s political, intellectual, and ethical stance, held since its inception, by putting forth an expression of “transnational solidarities” (to use Chandra Talpade Mohanty’s [2003] term), and a space for collective mourning and sense making, instead of approaching the subject from a position of detached theorisation or extractivism.

We at GPS are privileged and honoured to collaborate with guest editors who share that vision: Palestinian dancer, choreographer, and scholar Farah Saleh, and Dutch South African Indian feminist queer scholar and independent curator Chandra Frank. Farah and Chandra jointly led the curation of the issue in a sensitive committed manner rooted in their respective practices, their political commitments, and embodied knowledge. The clarity and rigour of their intellectual and creative vision, the generosity of their labour, and their thoughtful engagement with the contributors they have carefully selected, made the issue what it is: a manifestation of care, solidarity,^[1] and profound consideration of the demands of this moment of genocide, which is a challenging task.

This issue of GPS, “Cultural Resistance to Genocide”, in its form and content, extends an invitation for activation and collective engagement to the performance studies global community, and beyond. At its core, the issue emerges as an urgent expression of the journal and guest editors’ positionality, and a refusal of silence in the face of atrocities. As a scholarly journal, it puts forward an enquiry about the value, position, and capabilities of performance studies and performance practices as modes of critical and creative engagement with activist potentials in the moment of genocide. It asks: How can decolonial methodologies be extended to the current moment? What is the role and capacity of performance studies as an interdisciplinary critical paradigm, still entrenched in colonial legacies, in subverting invisibility and erasure, and in undoing the consequences of occupation? How can we, as transnational scholars and educators, “act” in the face of “scholasticide” where the entirety of Gaza’s education and knowledge systems are being decimated by Israel, including scholars, educators, students, universities, museums, libraries, and archives?^[2] Ultimately, how can we carry on “as normal” with our scholarship and our teaching when our colleagues and friends in Gaza are being killed or starved to death; when unspeakable crimes against all human principles have been occurring daily before our eyes, long before October 7^th 2023? We ask these questions whilst acknowledging existing and ongoing scholarly work on genocide from other disciplinary perspectives. In particular, the special issue curated by Zoé Samudzi (2021), “Against Genocide” for The Funambulist, offers a comprehensive and critical engagement with state violence, while also articulating “a critique of the legal and political concept of genocide itself as calibrated on eurocentric criteria”.

A methodological issue emerges while reflecting on these questions. Writing and theorising about genocide, in the language and the paradigms of empire, while witnessing the horrors and the complicity of a world that watches by; writing while navigating rage, grief, shame, and helplessness; writing when recognising that words, the English words, the language of colonial administration and its ideology of violence and cruelty, the same language used to justify genocide, are inadequate, if not inappropriate. In reflecting on the role and duty of writing during the time of genocide, Palestinian writer and performance artist Fargo Tbakhi (2023) critiques “craft” as a hegemonic system and as “the network of sanitizing influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic priorities of the state and of empire.” He argues that craft, especially in a moment of genocide, is a mechanism that dulls and replaces real liberatory tools or radical potentials: it is “a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures; it is a counterrevolutionary machine.” So to write in solidarity with Palestine, proposes Tbakhi, requires that we, as writers and artists, betray such hegemonic machine. At the same time, it requires that we stand in principled solidarity with the cultural Intifada,^[3] that goes hand in hand with the material Intifada, in an approach to writing “whose primary purpose is to gather others up with us,” mobilising for collective action and preparing for material work (Tbakhi). Or perhaps, as Palestinian writer Adania Shibli (2024) puts it, “we need to write not to become monsters.”^[4]

Archiving Lived Experience

A conscious decision was made from the outset to prioritise forms of archiving and documenting grounded in lived experience from different positions and in different registers, in an attempt to counter forms of erasure, fragmentation, and loss. An emphasis was placed on engaging with affective and artistic responses that carry a degree of immediacy and that reflect the realities of embodied lived experience of occupation, in keeping with the impulse to narrate, record, and document. In “Permission to Narrate”, Edward Said (1984) addresses the importance of narration and representation as an extension of the struggle and resistance of the Palestinian people against ethnic cleansing. Considering Zionist settler colonialism and its political motive of reducing Palestinian existence as much as possible, which includes denying the Palestinian narrative and its historical realities, one of the urgent tasks at hand appears to be to record such narratives of present actualities, those that are lived and experienced. After all, as Said puts it, “[f]acts do not at all speak for themselves, but require a socially acceptable narrative to absorb, sustain and circulate them” (34). The Zionist ideology has been demonstrating that discourse is not restricted to the realm of language, but it also moves into the realm of the real, which translates into material destruction and the most unimaginable atrocities. In reflecting on language and discourse, we were interested in asking how certain terms, prevalent in the discourse around genocide, such as solidarity, archiving, memory, transmission of cultural practices, and so on, might be rethought, particularly in contexts of dispossession and diasporic identities.

Not surprisingly, editing this issue during an unprecedented time of violence, precarity, and polycrisis that have impacted contributors and editors on varying scales, was not easy, nor was it seamless. In recognition of the conditions surrounding this project, and in keeping with the journal’s critical approach towards the dominant publishing conventions in neoliberal Anglophone publishing industry, the editorial process embraced care and solidarity at its heart. It partly meant putting well-being and contributors’ needs before oppressive colonial temporalities, allowing for slowness and interruptions, and giving ourselves permission to transgress. It meant reckoning with our own positionalities, the forces that try to silence us, the alliances that have shaped us….

As a Palestinian dancer, choreographer, and scholar currently based in Scotland, I was shocked and enraged by the silence of performance artists and scholars around the world when the genocide started in Gaza in October 2023. A community that constitutes performance studies and considers itself working on themes of social and political justice and very insistently on decolonisation. A work that after the genocide felt hollow to me, as decolonisation stayed a metaphor and never transformed into action. In this issue, I wanted to share actions and genuine responses to genocide by the artists who experienced it, and by their allies, where decolonial methodologies are practiced and not merely theorised.

On a personal level, I also needed to answer the question: why art now? what is my role as an artist and scholar? why not purely become an activist, a politician or a fighter?

Then I remembered the moment doctors gathered at Al Aqsa Hospital at the beginning of the genocide and sang together “Sawf Nabqaa Huna… Kay Yazul Al alam” (We will stay here... until the pain goes away) to get a boost of steadfastness. And the two women dancing hand in hand in front of their newly built tent in Rafah to show resilience. And the clowns performing for children in UNRWA schools turned into shelters in Gaza City to stay human and put a smile on children’s faces.^[5] I was reminded of the decolonial power of art, of practicing it and performing it during genocide, and wanted to share it with readers in this issue, while the genocide is still unfolding, and the silence is louder than ever.

As a Dutch South African Indian scholar and curator currently based in the US with a deep investment in feminist and queer politics, transnational collaborations, and the praxis of solidarity are at the heart of my praxis. My South African father shaped much of my awareness of Palestine, and I was lucky to grow up surrounded by adults who shaped my political consciousness by putting apartheid in South Africa in conversation with the ways in which Israeli settler colonialism functioned similarly. In December 2023, when I was in South Africa for research and to visit family and friends, I was surrounded by pro-Palestine gatherings, murals, flags, and conversations. I immediately noted the affective shift between the stifled climate in the US and being in South Africa. At a time where we are witnessing various sites of oppression and state violence, we are asked to critically reflect on the praxis of solidarity. It has been inspiring to see various student movements making efforts, albeit not without tension, to link broader conversations between Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo.

Nesreen’s invitation to work on a special issue titled “Cultural Resistance to Genocide” for Global Performance Studies was timely in that a lot of us have been grappling with what it means to be situated, in whatever way, in academic and artistic spaces. What kinds of criticalities can we afford in creative research praxis? For those of us who are embedded within the institution, it becomes vital to ask how we continue to “plot” within the confines of the university. I also join this conversation as a feminist queer scholar situated in a gender studies department in the Midwestern USA. In this sense, my engagement with performance studies frequently intersects with feminist theory and queer of colour critique in and outside the classroom.

In a recent class I taught on Global Sexualities, we collectively reflected on the frameworks necessary to engage with other forms and expressions of sexuality that are not necessarily rooted within a Western framework. As such, we turned to visual art and performance work to think with aesthetics, desire, embodiment, and queerness. Some of my students were moved by the creative risks taken in these un/translatable projects. Yet, as Hala Kamal (2008) reminds, “translation is not merely an act of transferring information, but a process of knowledge production” (274). As such, we might ask how performance studies as a field “translates” the current political moment, whether through knowledge production, solidarity work, or practice. What kinds of work does this require of us within an interdisciplinary field such as performance studies?

Chicana-Palestinian anthropologist Sarah Ihmoud posed the question, “What does it mean to practice feminism in a moment of bearing witness to genocide?” This question stayed with me in my academic work, collaborations, and in putting this issue together. To “practice” feminism in a time of genocide requires us to critically think about what it means to “bear witness”, and what we do with this “witnessing”. In putting this issue “Cultural Resistance to Genocide” together, we wanted to refrain from empty theorizations and extractive forms of knowledge production. Rather, we wanted to engage in a slower collaborative process that would allow contributors to meet the moment in a form or medium that felt attainable. In this sense, we also sought to stage encounters between artistic and performance-based practices and modes of writing that speak to the affective and material experiences of dispossession, and the disappearance of cultural practices. As such, this issue does not debate what kinds of states constitute genocide, but rather shows the multiple registers through which this moment in time is felt.

As an Egyptian artist, educator, and performance studies scholar, currently living between Cairo and London, my work is broadly concerned with examining the implications of colonial histories and the legacy of empire through critically exploring forms of performance and artistic practice, especially when negotiated as modes of resistance. My political consciousness and engagement with transnational social justice and anti-colonial praxis was largely shaped by my upbringing in a politically active Egyptian family invested in the Palestinian cause of liberation and self-determination. Egypt (a place that carries a complex colonial history) and Palestine are bound by key geopolitical, historical, and sociocultural links that resonate in the collective memories and popular imaginaries of Egyptians and Palestinians. Palestine has been part of my awareness and political memory for as far back as I can remember. It is not an abstract idea, but an extension of my identity, heritage, lived memory, and ethical commitments.

My connection to Palestine was partly shaped through the stories I heard as a child from family members, mostly my late father and the memories of his days as a volunteer doctor with the Palestinian resistance on the Jordanian borders with Occupied Palestine in the late 1960s, treating wounded Palestinians. Or my late uncle, a renowned artist and writer who dedicated much of his work to the Palestinian narrative. These lived experiences and exposures in my formative years nurtured my unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian people in their resistance and sumud (steadfastness) against the Zionist settler colonial order and apartheid that began, not only since the establishment of the State of Israel, followed by the Nakba in 1948, but it can be traced back to the emergence of political Zionism in Europe in the late nineteenth century.

The latest escalation of the ongoing genocide and systematic destruction in Gaza by the Zionist colonial forces since October 7^th 2023, the complicity of Western and Arab governments, and the silence of cultural and academic communities in Europe and the USA are part of a broader struggle and a legacy of colonialism that I have inherited. But this is so much more than a matter of personal political positionality and identification. Palestine is an issue that stands for the interconnectedness of liberation struggles across national borders, and a “litmus test for morality,” as Black feminist activist and poet June Jordan puts it (in Parmar 1991), that unmasks the selective solidarities, racialised injustices, and various forms of silencing that have been systematically at play for decades against Palestinians. Emphasising shared social realities in relational terms, Black feminist activist and author Angela Davis (2023), citing Jordan’s earlier statement, believes that the agenda of social justice in the world must include Palestine, for it “occupies a central place in political imagination of the last seventy-five years”. The settler colonial logics of segregation, violence, and annihilation, still at work daily against the Palestinian people, puts the struggle in Palestine in conversation with past histories of settler colonialism and apartheid, and with present realities of injustices, offering an opportunity to visibilise, reject, and dismantle them.

We publish this issue because we see (academic) publishing as a way to amplify the voices of others, especially the silenced and the oppressed. Zionism is not only a colonial project, but also a racialising one where anti-Palestinian racism systematically works to silence, exclude, erase, stereotype, defame, or dehumanise Palestinians and their narrative. Said (1980) points out how British imperialist and Zionist ideologies “are united in playing down and even cancelling out the Arabs in Palestine as somehow secondary and negligible” (18). Such anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian vision allows extreme forms of punitive discipline and dehumanisation against Palestinians and their existence, taking a range of forms that include:

This rationale justifies the genocidal violence, ethnic cleansing, and territorial expansion at play for decades in Palestine, and that has recently intensified since the October 7^th 2023 Israeli bombardment and assault on the Gaza strip. The anti-Palestinian logic is also echoed in the mechanisms of silence, exclusion, and denial surrounding the genocide in political, academic and cultural expressions, especially in Europe and the USA, most recently visible since October 7^th. It can be observed in the active silencing committed by universities and cultural institutions. In the exclusions of publications, conferences, festivals, and award bodies. In the silence and the denial of scholars, artists, committees, and board members. A silence, exclusion, and denial that facilitate the very thing that is rendered invisible or unnamed; that reinforce the structures of the genocidal colonial monster; and that feed its appetite for death and destruction.

Silence as complicity regarding colonial histories and realities has been a leitmotif in Euro-American academia. For, as sociocultural studies scholar Jairo I. Fúnez-Flores (2023) notes, “[a]cademia’s silence, complicity in colonialism in the past and present, repression of student organizations and protests, and outright support of Israel is sufficient proof that we need alternative models of knowledge production. Perhaps production is the wrong word. Perhaps the co-creation of knowledge lends itself to more radical possibilities.”

Our interest in turning to performance and contemporary art praxis to map creative resistance is to question what happens when discourses on social justice, solidarity, and anti-colonial and decolonial praxes that exclude the current genocide in Gaza, as well as in the Congo and Sudan, remain hollow and devoid of meaning. Notably, this requires us to be self-reflexive as well and to question what kinds of gaps and silences emerged in putting together this special issue. For instance, we had sought to make broader connections between Palestine, the Congo, and Sudan in this issue. This is particularly important to avoid collapsing distinctly different sites and experiences into each other. We also deem it important to continue to question what creative resistance and solidarity looks like in time of suppression and deportation. The field of performance studies cannot uphold its political and ethical relevance in this broader political context if critical engagement is not situated within the actual sites of struggle during the time of its unfolding, when we are witnessing in real-time the systematic annihilation of, not only human life, but also knowledge, culture, history, and land, through the bombardment of schools, universities, libraries, and cultural spaces; through the massacre of children, students, artists, teachers, scholars, and university workers; through the destruction of olive trees, animals, soil, and a wider ecological devastation; and through the displacement, dispossession, and weaponised starvation of millions of people in ways that obliterate the law and tear through all principles of humanity.

Mapping Transnational Interruptions

This special issue weaves together several artistic and scholarly transnational engagements with genocide, memory, solidarity, violence, and cultural resistance. While most of the contributions are situated in, or in response to, the genocide in Gaza, this issue seeks to make connections across time, space, and sites of experience—from South Africa to Bangladesh to Sudan. Art is a key site of inquiry. We understand that in this political moment, artistic expression captures the devastating realities of life under occupation, and offers various modalities to keep collective memory and struggle alive; from poetry, to kites, to fermentation; to jams and resistance songs. Cultural resistance, in this sense, is not merely about addressing the multiple forms of erasure that structure occupation. Rather, the contributions show that cultural resistance is “lived”. As such, the issue encompasses the entanglements between sites such as music, food, literature, sound, and the politics of land.

The centring of creative work in this issue reflects the challenge, and the limitations, of theorising the experiences of dispossession in this current moment. In sites of genocide, activists, artists, and scholars are undergoing the continued real-life implications of occupation, death, protest, silence, and devastation. What does it mean to still have to adhere to the expectations of academic publishing under these conditions? At the same time, we deemed it important to interrupt the silence within our respective disciplines. In “Why Palestine is a feminist issue: a reckoning with Western feminism in a time of genocide”, a conversation between Nicola Pratt, Afaf Jabiri, Ashjan Ajour, Hala Shoman, Maryam Aldossari, and Sara Ababneh (2025), published in International Feminist Journal of Politics, Jabiri poignantly remarks that “the responses to the genocide in Gaza expose a troubling gap between theory and action” (230–231). How then do we channel a radical theoretical praxis within performance studies? What does “action” look like within the format of academic publishing?

Moving away from thinking that is based on Eurocentric philosophy that divides the mind from the body, the theory from practice, and creates genre boundaries in the arts, we prioritised embodied practices and actions, and dissolved the boundaries between theatre, music, cooking, poetry, prose, painting, sound, and photography to decentralise the form and source of knowledge, experiences, and practices. Gazan painter and educator Basel El Maqosui contributes with a series of images and texts in response to experiences of displacement, or what he calls “artistic residencies” in Gaza during the genocide. His paintings, produced during the “residencies” are deeply visceral. In a recent series of Instagram posts featuring his paintings, El Maqosui (2024) writes, “I do not paint a picture of war—journalists can capture that with their cameras. My paintings are a longing for a kiss and an embrace. They are light that fills our hearts. They are testament to a genocide. They are our concerns during displacement and the anxiety of moving it from one place to another, and the fear of it, as if it were a family member.” Much of Gaza’s cultural spaces have been destroyed, including one of the most vibrant contemporary art spaces, Shababeek, which was completely destroyed in March 2024, leaving Palestinian artists with fewer or no means to share their work. The “artist residencies” organised by El Maqosui, can then also be seen as an important emergent form of artistic and performance-based work.

Themes of catastrophe and the uninhabitable are also critically engaged by Sudanese artist, architect, and researcher, Ola Hassanain. Her practice combines photography, video and sound to create immersive, sensory experiences that explore identity, displacement and environment displacement. Hassanain’s current project, Tell The Water What The Clay Kept Secret (2023–) is an ongoing visual research project, which explores intimate and familiar “sites of catastrophe”. In this project, Hassanain turns to her grandmother’s house, located in Sudan’s Gezira Scheme, a network of irrigation canals and slopes, as a “site of catastrophe”. The imperial Gezira Scheme was initiated by the British while the region was governed as part of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. In conversation with co-editor Chandra Frank, Hassanain unpacks the spatial implications of catastrophe: each iteration of the project reflects a specific cycle of catastrophe. By working with three scripts, Whispers, Watching, and Arrivals, Hassanain shares how water and clay, in the context of her grandmother’s house, manifest as cracks which tell us something about the durational and temporal implications of catastrophe. Hassanain’s work requires us to critically contemplate the connections between genocide, climates of waiting, and Black geographies.

Palestinian poet and playwright Dalia Taha shares her moving reflections on writing during genocide, amidst loss, erasure, and destruction, from her position in Ramallah, Palestine. As she poignantly puts it, “[t]his kind of writing makes a place unlike any other. It reminds you that we live in writing, no less than in homes. But it also tells you that writing is something dangerous.” Her most recent translated poems evoke glimpses of life under occupation and war, through beautifully articulated language that carry tenderness, resilience, and also grief. The Freedom Theatre, based in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the northern part of the West Bank, Palestine, in collaboration with Artists on the Frontline, share multiple contributions. “14 Demands Against Artistic Censorship & Genocide of Palestinian Culture” and “Kite Making” respond creatively and astutely to artists, activists, and allies worldwide who ask what they can do. The contributions offer a wide range of examples of concrete grounded actions, thoroughly contextualised and extended into a wealth of informative material, guides, learning resources, and creative tools to inspire collective action. Two short texts, “Freedom Under Siege” by Yahya Marei and “Maps of Emotion” by Aya Samara, emerge from Youth Against Invasion. The project invited young artists who live in different refugee camps, villages, and cities in the West Bank and 48 to reflect on the challenges they face, such as the continuous Israeli invasions of the Jenin Refugee Camp since 2023. Similarly to El Maqosui, “Maps of Emotion” by Samara speaks to writing as a cartographic practice, which holds traces of embodiment, memory, and loss. Samara situates writing as a “way of mapping” to “leave behind a map of emotions and stories, proof that even in the face of loss and destruction, we endure”.

With Palestinian artist Mirna Bamieh’s live art project, The Palestinian Hosting Society, these “cartographic” mappings extend to food cultures, and as such invite us not just to think with land, but with water and the environment. Bamieh’s project offers participants an opportunity to engage with traditional Palestinian foods that are on the verge of disappearing due to displacement and trauma. By orchestrating dinners, talks, and walks, Bamieh gathers fragments of these dishes and finds “ways to return them to the table, to the senses, to life”. Bamieh, in conversation with co-editor Chandra Frank, shares her most recent practice centred on grief and preservation of Palestinian food in exile, in addition to her Palestine Hosting Society work, through which disappearing Palestinian dishes are reexperienced through the “body, story, and substance”.

Here, we are reminded of the power of gathering, whether it is around the kitchen table or in a musical jam session. Indian-American musician and scholar Maya Bhardwaj asks, how “the jam”, “a form birthed by jazz, a music of Black resistance”, can “sound out a new way forward, while also embodying a collective keening at the present?” Traversing between South Africa and Bangladesh, Bhardwaj’s recollections of solidarity music events and jams show how “connecting sonic threads” become a ground for mourning and connection, as well as complex sites to tend to skewed solidarity politics. Irish researcher and musician Louis Brehony explores the role of music as a tool for Palestinian resistance and steadfastness, focusing on Gaza from October 7^th 2023. Drawing on the work of Palestinian Marxist leader and novelist Ghassan Kanafani, Brehony compellingly argues that the musical activities of those linked to both the Palestinian liberationist camp, and the Zionist occupation, are revealing of what is at stake in a civilisational confrontation. The issue closes with a powerful expression of sonic resistance by Palestinian sound researcher Bint Mbareh, generously created for this issue. The soundscape uses the unnerving sound of the drone that is constantly consumed by the people in Palestine. The haunting drone sound is heard against a complex layering of human sounds, including a choir mocking the drone and inaudible listing of martyrs’ names, that, together, disrupt the authority and unknowability that the oppressive presence of the drone imposes as an omnipresent force of the occupation.

We are honoured to hold this space for the artists, thinkers, writers, scholars, and activists featured here. We are grateful and humbled by their trust in sharing their experiences, thought, creativity, and labour during these harrowing times; when some of them are being displaced and facing immediate threats to their lives and livelihoods.^[6] This issue is published while we mark the second anniversary of Israel’s continued genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza since its latest escalation on October 7^th 2023. Our call for an end to Zionist colonial occupation, and for a liberated Palestine, Sudan, and the Congo, remain loud and uncompromising. We urge our readers to break the silence, to not look away, and above all, to listen to those who are telling us what is happening while they are living it. We lean on Tbakhi’s (2023) advice: “This can be our approach: to engage in a guerilla war on the page, to consider it an additional front in our solidarity with those who will always and forever be the targets of the state’s weapons.”

Notes

^[1] This term, used repeatedly throughout this Editorial, can be read in light of Sara Ahmed’s ([2004] 2014) understanding that “[s]olidarity does not assume that our struggles are the same struggles, or that our pain is the same pain, or that our hope is for the same future. Solidarity involves commitment, and work, as well as the recognition that even if we do not have the same feelings, or the same lives, or the same bodies, we do live on common ground” (189).

^[2] “Scholasticide” is a term first coined by Oxford professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2008–2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, and it describes the systemic destruction of Palestinian education within the context of Israel’s decades-long settler colonisation and occupation of Palestine (Desai 2024).

^[3] This term is a nod to the Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp, founded by Juliano Mer Khamis and Zakaria Zubeidi in 2006, which work is partly premised on Mer Khamis’ statement that “the third Intifada will be a cultural one.” Moreover, Mer Khamis stresses that what they do in the theatre “is not trying to be a substitute or an alternative to the Palestinian resistance in the struggle for liberation, just the opposite. This must be clear. […] We are freedom fighters” (Freedom Theatre n.d.).

^[4] Shibli recalls this statement from a conversation with a friend of hers in Gaza, where he said “I need to write not to become a monster.” She further adds, “I think this is what writing is suddenly like, yes, you’re right we need to write not to become monsters” (Shibli 2024).

^[5] The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East.

^[6] We wish to thank all those who contributed generously to the fundraising campaign launched by the journal to support contributors to this issue who are facing continued displacement and destruction of the basic infrastructure to support life.

Works Cited

Ahmed, Sara. (2004) 2014. The Cultural Politics of Emotion, 2^nd edn. Edinburgh University Press.

Arab Canadian Lawyers Association. 2022. “Anti-Palestinian Racism: Naming, Framing and Manifestations: Community Consultations and Reflections.” https://www.canarablaw.org/our-work.

Hussein, Nesreen N. 2022. “Decolonisation and Performance Studies: Questions from the Border.” Global Performance Studies 5 (1–2): 1–2. https://doi.org/10.33303/gpsv5n1-2a114.

Kamal, Hala. 2008. “Translating Women and Gender: The Experience of Translating the Encyclopedia of Women and Islamic Cultures into Arabic.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36 (3): 254–68. https://doi.org/10.1353/wsq.0.0105.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs 28 (2): 499–535. https://doi.org/10.1086/342914.

Parmar, Pratibha, dir. 1991. A Place of Rage. Kali Films. Excerpt available at: https://vimeo.com/876868338.

Pratt, Nicola, Afaf Jabiri, Ashjan Ajour, Hala Shoman, Maryam Aldossari, and Sara Ababneh. 2025. “Why Palestine Is a Feminist Issue: A Reckoning with Western Feminism in a Time of Genocide.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 27 (1): 226–50. https://doi.org/10.1080/14616742.2025.2455477.

Said, Edward. 1984. “Permission to Narrate.” Journal of Palestine Studies 13 (3): 27–48. https://doi.org/10.2307/2536688.

Refusing Silence: Mapping Cultural Resistance to Genocide

Chandra N. Frank, Nesreen N. Hussein and Farah Saleh

“We need to write not to become monsters”

Archiving Lived Experience

Mapping Transnational Interruptions

Notes

Works Cited