Ugliness and lullabies.The politics and aesthetics of waiting in Palestinian refugee camps

Dr. Ruba Salih (SOAS)

Abstract: In the social sciences, the time and space of refugeehood is conventionally conceived as one of waithood. Refugee camps are often analysed through the prism of exception or suspension of normality, and forced migrants or refugees are mainly seen as affective communities of trauma and suffering. In addition, the (European) national-statist time space/horizon continues to be the bedrock against which experiences and subjectivities of those on the move are read and interpreted.  The refugee camp, in this political imaginary, is an abnormality, a barren place-time in which refugees are suspended, or trapped, in a time of waithood, merely waiting for their re-insertion into a national order of things. Life in this time-space is read through the trope of emergency and temporariness, the latter acquiring the ontological quality of non-time and non-agency. In this paper, I investigate what happens when temporariness and precarity become a permanent horizon of life across generations, like in the case of encamped Palestinian refugees who have been displaced since 1948. In my work on and with Palestinian refugees, particularly in the occupied West Bank, I explore the condition of permanent temporariness as a politically productive condition, and of the refugee camp as the most potent signifier of this condition. An ethnography of the politics and aesthetic of the camp reveals ways in which temporariness can become a powerful antidote to the normalisation of the occupation. The politics and aesthetic of the camp is one that is constantly alert to the incumbent risks of normalisation, and vigilant to the operations and mutations of power under the longe duree’ of the occupation .

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