FOREWORD
At a time when we are witnessing genocide in real time, when violence and despair are sweeping over everything, the idea of resolving this crisis through “cultural means” seems untenable. However, this unbearable panorama can only be transformed through radical cultural intervention.In this house, after more than a decade of dialogue with a specific community, we have come to understand what a field is-like those created at universities last spring or those presented in these pages just five years ago-and how they can offer not only an ethical positioning, but also a space for resistance, exchange, appreciation and mutual learning.
Thus, aware of the hostility Derrida wrote about, this volume takes as its starting point Arab hospitality from different languages and artistic practices that are no strangers to their shared roots. Together with Nadia Yaqub, we reflect on how Gaza crosses our screens through the constant “poor images” created by the Palestinian peoples themselves. If we care for this effort to engender new affections and relationships, we can conceive of these images as acts of extreme generosity: an invitation to their interiority, a radical intimacy in the face of the constant snatching away of it. “In the face of the pain of others,” increasingly heartbreaking, the creation of an ethical ‘citizenship of photography,’ as Ariella Aïsha Azoulay proposes, seems an impossible challenge. Nevertheless, these images, however heartbreaking, continue to mobilize worlds that constitute, in their future, what Sarah Sharma calls “chronography of power”: new forms from which to sustain what we call the public.
These worlds, such as those that emerged after the siege and fall of the Tall al-Za’tar refugee camp in Lebanon in 1976, or those that emerge from the current experiences present in this issue, continue to shape material cultures that preserve and transmit fragments of suspended life. Legacies that take on greater force if we consider, as Sandi Hilal suggests, the act of nurturing the imagination, establishing roots, and creating connections through storytelling. Here, the Arabic word rawā (storytelling), interchangeable with saqā (watering) or qaṣṣ (cutting), opens new avenues for thinking about repair, memory, and community. This discursive practice has allowed us to generate questions such as “does the countryside have a history?” and to challenge the dominant frameworks that the West imposes on what is considered heritage. For Hilal, the First Intifada during her adolescence transformed the hostility of a military colonial regime into the foundations of a praxis of radical hospitality, grounded in a feminism that shuns direct confrontation and, like water seeking its furrow, develops alternative forms of negotiation, empowerment and inheritance.
This flow evokes the crystallization of another image, reminding us how the cultural expectations of modernity, which consolidated a linear vision of the future after World War II, gave way, since the 1960s, to women’s rights, anti-racist, decolonization and pro-environmental movements that proposed alternatives to modern infrastructures. Within this truncated Western futurity, Jussi Parikka identifies other dislocated temporalities emerging from built environments, such as Gulf futurism. This nexus between consumerism and reconfigured orientalism, although devoid of the utopian potential of Afrofuturism, introduces temporal complications and anachronistic episodes that alter the linearity of time associated with progress. The futurisms collected in this essay redefine the temporal logics that had condemned these subjects.
From this complex temporality, the notion of “noon” promoted by La Madraza -a ‘mediodía‘ (noon) that is neither East nor West- is charged with power, starting from a debate on the intercultural connections between the Christian, the Jewish and the Muslim, and extending towards an encounter with the South, reconnecting with the Andalusian memory in its transgeographical sense. This sort of transatlantic alliance weaves an expanded south: a south of regional and diasporic cultures. According to Charles Hirschkind, this opens up opportunities for a geopolitical imaginary that breaks with the historical realities that separate Islamic and Judeo-Christian principles and imagines a “way out” that articulates another re-evaluated gaze. From a perspective of Andalucism that crosses the categories of the political, the cultural and the aesthetic, an ethical project is configured based on the valuation of medieval al-Andalus and its multiple capacities to historicize, exploring aesthetic, linguistic and musical traditions such as those proposed in the colored spreads of these pages: “Believe in your word even if they say no, people just blablablablá, and I lalala,” states the anti-colonial songbook Tetuan, Tetuán تطوان, curated by Adrian Schindler. This is followed by the calligraphic work of Monia Ben Hamouda who addresses the traumas and rituals coming from the legacies of the Arab diaspora from the idea of qaher قهر, a word that could be translated as a simmering “anger”.
These efforts, such as those of watering the rice communities of Lumbung Press -which accompany us with Learning Palestine-, the emancipating call of the Palestinian cultural fabric presented by Elias Rizek and conveyed by the Owneh initiative, or the claims of Nicolás Combarro from TEJA in our institutional framework, invite us to think about the deep infrastructural transformations that the current limitations demand. Finally, to continue counting, watering and cutting from this house, or from the alley, as Sadik Kwaish Alfraji outlines, offers the possibility of hosting a ‘mediodía‘ where the impossible becomes fertile soil for a memory that, despite the efforts to destroy it -as we see in Jawa El Khash’s Syrian Raqqa-, resists to disappear. From these encounters, we try to compose ourselves with the potentialities of a social and political community that are barely perceptible from the dominant epistemological order. Thus, radical hospitality, the legacies of the Arab diaspora and movements of cultural transformation intertwine to question the colonial frameworks that dominate the concept of heritage and move towards a more plural, emancipatory and complex practice of a time of alliances that resists dehumanization.
