are we all Palestinians?
I don't think so. Carlos Latuff, cartoonist from Brazil, has created quite a stir w/ his cartoons that depict different oppressed people who say "I am Palestinian" from a Vietnamese to a Native American to an African American. First of all, the images are crude and reductive; they only present people of color as victims; they are in a moment in history as though that representation, "post civil war" for example, is the quintessential text of oppression. It erases the nuances and it also conflates Palestinians' particular experiences under Israel with all other people's experiences under repressive governments.
I was at an anti-war demonstration in ann arbor and a skinny white guy was wearing a shirt that said "we are all Palestinians," and I really wanted to knock him on his head. Arrogance, presumption. I am Iraqi-American and I would not wear that shirt. I do not deserve to wear that shirt with all of my American privileges. I cannot articulate how wrong and how smug it is. so this latuff, I won't say I want to smack him because I, maybe unfairly, did not have the same hostile response.
Latuff's blog is engaging but I am leery of his politics. anyone else have an opinion on his work or these cartoons? please share.
9/13/06 addendum to this post:
see controversy over Gwyneth Paltrow's I am African Aids campaign & comments posted by nubian on blac(k)ademic blog. This is beyond comment for me & this exemplifies what I am talking about. very, very lost liberal.
I was at an anti-war demonstration in ann arbor and a skinny white guy was wearing a shirt that said "we are all Palestinians," and I really wanted to knock him on his head. Arrogance, presumption. I am Iraqi-American and I would not wear that shirt. I do not deserve to wear that shirt with all of my American privileges. I cannot articulate how wrong and how smug it is. so this latuff, I won't say I want to smack him because I, maybe unfairly, did not have the same hostile response.
Latuff's blog is engaging but I am leery of his politics. anyone else have an opinion on his work or these cartoons? please share.
9/13/06 addendum to this post:
see controversy over Gwyneth Paltrow's I am African Aids campaign & comments posted by nubian on blac(k)ademic blog. This is beyond comment for me & this exemplifies what I am talking about. very, very lost liberal.
posted by DangerousDerrida at Saturday, September 09, 2006
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6 Comments:
I think the point of the slogan is to emphasise the universal nature of oppression and to articulate solidarity in a manner which avoids indulging in guilt.
It's also worth pointing out the slogan is hardly new. As far as I'm aware it originates from Paris, May 1968. When counter-revolutionaries called for Daniel Cohn-Bendit to be sent to the gas chambers, students marched through the streets proclaiming that they were all "German Jews."
If you want to find a really dubious variation on the theme, check out the placards that appeared on one of the Lebanese solidarity demos in the UK asserting "We are all hezbollah now." Unfortunately I'm still waiting for my RPG to arrrive...
thanks for letting me know that the point of slogan is to emphasize the universal nature of oppression.
could we articulate solidarity w/o co-opting others' identities?
americans and brits should indulge in guilt: guilt is what people don't have enough of. [this is the Catholic in me.]
"we are all hezbollah" was here in Michigan/bothered me then too.
rpg?
b more disillusioned, kid
nayj
i think i could really go either way on this--on the one hand i agree with you completly, but on the other hand, by saying palestinians are their own people with their own problems it very often has a way of continuing the "otherization" of arab people in general and palestinian people in particular. in other words, it turns into "we all have problems, but WE aren't blowing people up" sort of thing, you know? Which i have encountered in many "radical" settings.
I know that with the duke rape case, a lot of people (including me) came out on our blogs and said, "we are that stripper" even tho we really aren't, and in my case, i've never even stripped. but I was looking at more that as a woman of color, I can think I'm different or better than her, and that nobody would ever rape ME, because I'm not a stripper--but in all reality, in the eyes of oppression, it doesn't matter if i'm a stripper or a business woman, i'm still a woman of color, and therefor rapable.
And it personally drives me crazy when mexicans/chicanos come out with the we're palestinian too shit, but at the same time, I talked with a few arab people, and they said that they don't have a problem at all with it.
I think, in the end, for me, it comes down to how are you using the stance within your work. Are you using it (as FAR too many annarborites/ypsilantians do) as a way to appropriate and speak for? Or are you using it as a way to stand in solidarity with and work in alliance with? For example, I'd never dream of attempting to tell the sex workers who are organizing around the rape what to do or how to do it or that maybe they shouldn't center sex worker liberation as a way to resist and basebuild. I personally think that what they are doing is revolutionary in the highest order, but if i DIDN"T--if i was embarrassed of the sex worker aspect, even then, I'd keep my mouth shut and either stand along side them or in back of them, which ever they needed me to do, you know?
you are very right bfp. both you and DK have your points. it all depends on who is wearing the shirt and where s/he is coming from. I just see some smug clueless folks who want to be down and identified w/ colored folks but what are they doing besides wearing that shirt ?
I thought the cartoons were a bigger issue than the tshirts since so many different historical moments were being truncated and conflated into one another.
I have to say it is easier to say "I am that stripper" if I have never been a stripper. See? It is an important rhetorical point and a strategic solidarity but it can only be that--strategy and rhetoric because we cannot know what her life is like. all women are vulnerable to rape, and a woman of color even more so. I guess I am even ambivalent about this too even though you really DO make a compelling argument. let's keep strategizing!?
Nayj,
Your point about the co-option of identities is, I think, an important one. I'm always pretty dubious about western activists who wear keffiyehs without any idea of their cultural significance or what any of the arabic writing that some of them bear says.
I disagree on the guilt issue, because I think it's a bad start for a revolutionary politics. I worry that it is incapable of moving beyond a Make Poverty History style liberal humanitarianism in which we "help" the Third World rather than allowing them to achieve self determination.
Oh, and the RPG thing was my idea of a joke. That said, there is a serious point in there somewhere, namely my concern that much of the western left's identification with the likes of Hezbollah stems from a pursuit of vicarious struggle: a hope that somebody else will do the fighting so we don't have to.
DK,
the guilt was my idea of a joke. I am not a good enough Catholic by most people's standards. I have had enough guilt to fill my basement, attic, and all the bedrooms, kitchen,
you get the domestic picture...
by guilt I meant responsibility, culpability and then action.
yes,we need to fight our own battles and combat the demons in our domain --how?
will bloggers (writers en masse) be at the front?
some arab bloggers disagree: see-raf@www.aqoul.com
see conversation over at abuaardvark
http://abuaardvark.typepad.com/abuaardvark/2006/08/arab_political_.html#trackback
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