There has been a cultural renaissance across Palestinian societies whereby creatives and artists use writing, music, drama, and visual arts to reclaim and safeguard their identity during extended socio-political turmoil. The cultural renaissance is a branding move towards safeguarding cultural narrative and resilience using imagination and articulation.
Palestinian artists engage lived experience, social commentary, and historical memory to call forth the richness of life in occupation and diaspora. Transmedia, they address local and international publics through heritage, displacement, and collective identity. Representations of everyday life forego poetically nostalgic visions of lost homeland and redeployments of classical tropes in attempts to call forth a shared history transcending and preceding spatial divisions.
Literature has also seen Palestinian writers gaining prominence for exilic literature, resistance, and cultural continuity. Palestinian writers such as Mahmoud Darwish and Susan Abulhawa have written highly acclaimed novels with vivid descriptions of the Palestinian condition. They are two types of individual catharsis and cultural survival and hence survival through collective memory of literature.
Music also has its role in the culture process. Palestinian artists attempt to merge old music with new modes, and that is what they achieve carrying heritage alongside contemporary realities. Music lyrics address ambitions, struggles, and nationalism, and hence music is both a campaign tool and an emotional mobilizer. The fusion of the new and old results in a distinct voice in music.
Theatrical performance is also a central mode of resistance and narrative. It has been used as a mode of engagement with social issues, for resisting censorship, and for sparking debate by using groups such as The Freedom Theatre in Jenin. By providing the actors with a space of expression and sites of re-taking power while, at the same time, challenging the public sphere in general with narratives otherwise excluded from hegemony, the groups provide the drama.
Visual artists are also leading the charge with this cultural rebirth, using painting, sculpture, photography, and public installation to engage questions of identity, being, and the effect of war. Graffiti in city walls and in galleries are in some instances acts of rebellion, reclaiming urban wallspace as space for presence and voice. Reclaiming the visual space is about the resistance of Palestinian presence and voice.
This ongoing cultural renaissance is not so much a clinging tradition but an adaptive one in adversity by resistance, social mobilization, and creativity. Palestinian artists are not so much clinging to heritage but plotting its new course in a new world. In their work, they continue to map out cultural identity and working towards broader international awareness of the Palestinian cause.
