Imperial violence is our commons, our form of being together.

– Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism

We invite short responses that engage Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s rethinking of the relationship between violence and the commons in contemporary cultural production and political organizing.

To acknowledge the violence inherently embedded in archives—particularly in cultural archives that the neutral we understand as our cultural commons—and to then envision new ways of being with these cultural objects so as to allow them to speak their own futures are essential components of the urgent project of unlearning imperialism. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s investigation into dynamics of the spatial, temporal, and body politic of these cultural commons often foregrounds physical objects and images, primarily photographic ones. In Jumana Manna’s film A Magical Substance Flows Into Me: The Musical Diversity of Palestine (2015), music is the focus. A catalog of Oriental music from a 1930s radio show by the German Jewish ethnomusicologist Robert Lachmann that Manna takes as her subject is a fruitful catalyst for unpacking imperial logics of the archive, spatial regimes, and the classifying of subjects according to their ethnic identities. The performance of multiple diasporic traditions, Manna demonstrates, can counter-map spatial logics in ways that resist the imperial imagination. However, Manna’s film also serves to highlight entanglements of “worldly sovereignty” vs. “imperial citizenship”{1} set in the landscapes of Israel and Palestine.

Each week Robert Lachmann invited musicians playing traditional Oriental (Arab and Eastern Jewish) music to play on his 1930s radio show, framing the work with informational commentary. Lachmann often used terms like magic, revealing a penchant for exoticization or for distancing these practices from modernity. He encouraged “pure, unspoiled . . . local kind of music”{2} and advocated against using non-traditional instruments or recording with musical notation. Manna appreciates his labor of love, but is acutely aware that, as the founder of an archive of Oriental music at the Hebrew University, he is aligned with the project of the colonizer—is “part of the knowledge/power nexus of colonialism . . . the system that erased Palestine.”{3}

In her film, Manna also takes on the role of the archivist, as she travels to different sites to record contemporary examples of each of Lachmann’s subjects. One by one, Manna frees these pure objects of study from the archive so we, the viewers of the film, can listen to the soulful, historical music and witness its performance in the world. In her book Potential History, Azoulay frequently evokes Audre Lorde’s message that you cannot dismantle the master’s house with the master’s tools,{4} but Manna’s retracing of the master’s map allows for correctives, for alternative and multiple imaginaries. She reads Lachmann’s notes with irony and a tone of play and mimicry, as a performer at Carnival might wear the costume of the colonist.

The experience of music in the film is foregrounded over language and imposed meaning. Lyrics are not translated, musicians are not named (until the final credits) except for the tradition they represent, which is named through the reading of Lachmann’s notes. For Manna, this strategy supports an “alternative form of narrative or of memory, one that’s through a libidinal form or a muscle memory.”{5} The affective experience of the music short-circuits the viewer’s impulses to reinscribe a colonial organization of knowledge.

The film is a platform for these objects to perform, while situated in the cultures and spaces of the performers—in homes and private areas for work or prayer or leisure. The testimony and music of one artist, Neta Elkayam, is particularly moving as the Morrocan Jewish singer makes a case for honoring layered, diasporic cultures against Israel’s monolithic national culture. She speaks and cooks in her kitchen, her words sandwiched by two impassioned songs, accompanied by Amit Hai on what appears to be a very non-traditional banjo.

from A MAGICAL SUBSTANCE FLOWS INTO ME: THE MUSICAL DIVERSITY OF PALESTINE (Jumana Manna, 2015).

Beyond a simple liberation or recuperation, however, Manna’s work is bound up in drawing attention to the violence that circumscribes the musicians’ lives, as well as an awareness of history (bolstered by her history professor father, who is just finishing a chapter on the Nakba, on extermination and expulsion). Manna systematically introduces each musical event within a tightly framed landscape or fragment of a neighborhood and approaches the exteriors of homes and windows leading to kitchens, to enter into the cramped domestic spaces in which most of the action takes place. This strategy is born of her own experience of claustrophobia as a Palestinian woman living in Jerusalem{6} and alludes to the segregation and unequal positioning of the various citizens and non-citizens. Historical Palestine does not exist any longer.

Manna is careful to note the contradictions that evade a simple call to harmonious coexistence through the transcendence of music: A Bedouin in Bge’a Village, Naqab interrupts the viewer’s potential expectation of a pastoral demeanor as he disses the historical recording, saying “this is a peasant playing,” and that “the internet ruined it for us.” Following Lachmann’s description of the music of Kurdish Jews, in which trance and demons that speak through the musician are coolly mentioned, the heart-stopping beauty of Kurdish-Jewish liturgical song is performed in the setting of an economics and real estate appraisal office located in Jerusalem. The office is decorated with layers of maps, the camera panning over a computer and papers that read “Table of Land Expropriation According to Plan 4558” and “Judea and Sumera Area Supreme Planning Council,” followed by a close up of the rapturous listening expression on a young office colleague’s face.

As Eyal Weizman has written, the strategy of Israel’s perpetually encroaching occupation is one of “elastic geography.”

The elastic nature of the frontier does not imply that Israeli trailers, homes, roads or indeed the concrete wall are in themselves soft or unyielding, but that the continuous spatial reorganization of the political borders they mark out responds to and reflects political and military conflicts. The various inhabitants of this space do not operate within the fixed envelopes of space—space is not the background for their actions, an abstract grid on which events take place—but rather the medium that each of their actions seeks to challenge, transform or appropriate. Moreover, in this context the relation of space to action could not be understood as that of a rigid container to ‘soft’ performance. Political action is fully absorbed in the organization, transformation, erasure and subversion of space.{7}

Given this context, perhaps the rearticulation of polyphony—to take the concept Bakhtin has borrowed from music and apply it back—of diasporic voices, rhythms, vibrations, joys, sorrows, and movements of people that embody many divided and buried cultures, counters both the tactics of frontier architecture and imperial imaginaries through their inscription of geographies that follow logics not sanctioned by the state. Manna’s attention to these polyphonic geographies in the present mirrors Azoulay’s call to shift from the “temporal axis and its historical markers of beginning, end, or post.”{8} Musicians are performing their own kind of elastic geography and planting seeds in the experience of viewers of the film who are thus invited to become co-citizens.{9}