An Assemblage of Decoloniality? Palestinian Fellahin Resistance and the Space-Place Relation

Authors

  • Mark Muhannad Ayyash Mount Royal University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.26522/ssj.v12i1.1528

Keywords:

Assemblage, Space-Place, Palestinian Fellahin, Decoloniality

Abstract

This paper examines how fellahin resistance beginning in the early parts of the 20thcentury interacted with the Zionist settler-colonial project, focusing on how this resistance operated on a complex understanding of the relation between the fixity of place and flux of space. Thinking this resistance alongside theories of colonial occupation as well as Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of assemblage and the smooth-striated mixture of space, I argue that following the complex interplay between space (flux) and place (fixity), as opposed to resolving it, may yield a promising pathway in Palestinian, and perhaps global, decolonial resistances today. This can be observed in the contemporary resistance of Palestinian fellahin in the village of Bil‘in, whose repertoires of action constitute an assemblage, both spatially and temporally. I argue that one of the important lessons found in the discourse and actions of Bil‘in activists is that land is autonomous of human desires and plans, of ethno-national ideological projects. Opening politics to the insight that the flux of space cannot be tamed within a bounded nation-state produces a decolonial resistance that sees the displacement of people from the land as the displacement of life itself.

Author Biography

Mark Muhannad Ayyash, Mount Royal University

Mark Muhannad Ayyash is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Director of The Peace Studies Initiative at Mount Royal University, Calgary. He specializes in social, political and postcolonial theory, the study of violence, social movements, decolonial conceptions of space and time, as well as culture and politics in the Middle East. His previous articles have dealt with the Iraq War, “violent dialogue” between Hamas and the Israeli State, the exiling writing of Edward Said, the question of past violences in transnational Palestinian youth movements, and the paradox of political violence. He has a forthcoming co-edited book titled, “Protests and Generations: Legacies and Emergences in the Middle East, North Africa and the Mediterranean” (Brill). 

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Published

2018-07-12

Issue

Vol. 12 No. 1 (2018): Global Movement Assemblages

Section

Global Movement Assemblages

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