Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces

Gabriel Varghese’s Palestinian Theatre in the West Bank: Our Human Faces is confronted by a few unenviable tasks presented to it by the dearth of academic writing on Palestinian theater, especially in monograph form. First, it must work as a history lesson on Palestine, ensuring that the readers who come to it from theater and performance studies are provided with enough context to understand the stakes of the exceptional experience of theater and performance faced by Palestinians. Second, it must intervene in a field—Palestine cultural studies, broadly speaking—that for its own reasons neglects theater and performance in favor of written literature, from poetry to the novel, the visual and plastic arts, and cinema. Third, it must provide a theoretical vantage point from which to view diverse artistic practices that take place under vastly differing historical and political conditions, a vantage point that does not overwrite these diverse practices but positions them as responding to a shared concern. Finally, it has to analyze live theater production, a complicated medium to discuss academically, considering the fleeting nature of performance, the “you had to have been there” nature of a good play, and the behind-the-scenes workings of theater, which are often occluded by the performance event but remain necessary for understanding theater’s place in culture. Varghese’s book meets these difficult tasks with aplomb and erudition, an impressive feat considering the book’s readability and its brisk 166 pages. The book’s first chapter provides a history lesson on settler colonialism in Palestine and introduces the book’s central theoretical apparatus. Here, Varghese argues that due to the hegemonic nature of Zionist discourse in creating a public sphere in which Palestinian voices are excluded, the theater has worked as a “counterpublic,” one that utilizes a number of tactics to “disrupt, subvert and bypass the Zionist public sphere” (p. 2). Varghese marshals the psychoanalytic and queer theoretical concept of abjection to analyze Palestinian theater’s position in relation to the Zionist public sphere. In brief, the argument here, which structures the rest of the book, is that abjection is a form of governance that uses political power to violently exclude a group of subjects. This leads to a revolt of the subject, or in Varghese’s words, “abjection, then, is about the revolt (or resistance) of those subjects whom the state constitutes and marginalizes as revolting (disgusting)” (p. 4). Theater in Palestine, then, is positioned as a key site in which this revolt—a “cultural intifada,” as the book later terms it—is performed, allowing Palestinian subjects to insist on and perform the very humanness denied to them by the Israeli state. In insisting on the abject nature of Palestinian theater makers and performers, this framework comes too close to suggesting that Palestinian cultural and social identity is constituted purely in negation to Zionism’s erasure. While I am sure this is not what Varghese believes or, indeed, what the book proposes, more care could have been taken in this introductory chapter to insist on other dimensions that contribute to Palestinian