Picasso Is Mightier Than the M16: On Imaging and Imagining Palestine’s Resistance in the Global Community

This article studies the Picasso in Palestine exhibit in light of what it means to be a modern and resistant Palestinian colonial subject, living in a sovereign state-to-be in our contemporary global world. By drawing on theories of the imagination, resistance studies, art, and internal relations, as well as discourse analysis of the content of the project, field interview material, and published critiques of the project, the article queries the conceptual boundaries of studying the Picasso in Palestine project. The article contextualizes a moment in Palestine’s history of visual cultural production within wider debates and scholarship on the construction of resistant praxis in cultural production; the distribution of power; culture and representation; and image circulation, translation, and reception in a colonial setting, global context, and transnational frame. Tracing the readings of the project across transnational space by locating them within the discourses they engaged with in both the “global” arts circuit as well as the “local” cultural scene, the article rethinks transnational processes of arts production emergent from and focused on Palestine, the different forms that resistance in cultural practices take and how they acquire different meanings in the process of travel.