Promised Lands : Memory, Politics, and Palestinianness in Santiago de Chile

Abstract: This study is a comprehensive attempt to grapple with diasporic Palestinianness in Santiago de Chile. Based on long-term fieldwork from 2013 to 2014 within Palestinian-Chilean networks, organizations, and places it explores how an inherently political Palestinianness is constituted, expressed and explored via memory on the one hand and processes related to space and place on the other. Palestinianness is employed here as a concept that captures all that goes into maintaining a Palestinian presence in Santiago. Rather than a fixed category, Palestinianness is something that works and is worked upon in ways that are inseparable from, in this case, the context of lived life in the Chilean capital. It is a host of experiences and practices that cannot be neatly separated, but that are constantly weaved together in steadily recurrent, but sometimes disruptive and surprising patterns. By interrogating Palestinianness within the distinct context of present-day Santiago, the thesis unsettles and reconfigures conceptualizations of the relationship between memory, space, and politics. It does so by delving into the ambiguities at play in Palestinian-Chilean relationships to the often uncomfortable memory politics of post-dictatorship and the ongoing Palestinian struggle respectively. To shed light on the dynamics at play, transmemory is introduced as a concept that seeks to capture the spatial and spatially mobile qualities of memory. The thesis argues that by engaging with traveling memories of life and conflict in the old land and simultaneously rejecting involvement with continuously troubling memories of the recent Chilean past, Palestinian-Chileans form a collective politics of Palestinianness that is nonetheless distinctly marked by an inescapable Chileanness.