CULTURES OF RESISTANCE IN PALESTINE AND BEYOND: ON THE POLITICS OF ART, AESTHETICS, AND AFFECT

With the popular uprisings that erupted in several countries across the Middle East and North Africa from 2011 onwards, street protests—in the form of ordinary people's creative and challenging artistic expressions could no longer be left unnoticed. From Tahrir Square to Gezi Park, public spaces came to be inhabited by graffiti, music, art, and performances, which engendered and conveyed new affective and political ties. Academic and non-academic writing increasingly emphasized the pervasiveness of art and music in streets, squares, factories, and neighborhoods where crowds gathered and protests assembled. Yet some observers were too quick to celebrate artistic and cultural production as a driving force of the recent uprisings and as naturally defiant and oppositional.12 In fact, the artistic productions stemming from and deployed as soundtracks of the political protests were varied and complex. Even when they were explicitly calling for a radical change of existing social and political orders, the oppositional and disruptive potential of these artistic expressions has sometimes been at risk of neutralization at the hands of political co-optation or market commodification. In a similar vein, protest art proved to be resistant to some oppressive structures, while contributing to strengthening others at the same time. Thus, protest art revealed the potential to challenge one established