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Introduction

The book is a collaboration between Mannes-Abbott and writers and artists, whom he asked to respond to his narrative. My Introduction is informed by my visit to Palestine in 2010, on an invitation from the Ramallah-based AM Qattan Foundation, as a juror for their Young Palestinian Artist of the Year Award, when I likewise witnessed military occupation at first-hand.

The research is part of an ongoing project with two other papers, ‘Voices in the Singular Plural: “Palestine c/o Venice” and the Intellectual Under Siege’ (Third Text, 2009, pp 789-801) and ‘Palestinian Art From 1850 to the Present’ (Third Text, 2010, pp 481-489; ISSN 0952-8822). The former traces the history of Palestine in the Venice Biennale and the censorship of Palestinian artists and filmmakers. The latter is a survey of the eponymous history of Palestinian modernism by exiled artist Kamal Boullata, which negates Zionist claims that Palestinian society was ‘backward’. Boullata’s insistence on the importance of documenting Palestinian heritage is reflected by Widad Kawar’s book Threads of Identity, 2011, on women’s embroidery traditions, which I was commissioned to review for Journal of Palestinian Studies, 2011. Cultural inheritance is revisited in my Introduction to Boullata’s book, Between Exits, 2012, (pp 21-29; ISBN 978-1-907317-91-0) on paintings by the exiled Gazan artist Hani Zurob, featuring his young son. My text referred to three international reports on Israeli abuse of human rights of Palestinian children, effectively traumatising the next generation.