Beta
133418

“We’re Holding our Ground”: Body Politics, Verbal/Non-Verbal Performance, and Dissent Aesthetics in Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry

Article

Last updated: 04 Jan 2025

Subjects

-

Tags

-

Abstract

Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian performance poet and human rights activist who uses the power of the spoken word interfused with stage performance in order to mainstream Palestinians' experiences of occupation, diaspora, and dispossession as much as the daily struggle for survival, steadfastness, and resistance into American and human pop culture. Performance Poetry, as such, has become a platform for social and political dissent where the poet/performer begins her performance with a Palestinian story at the same time that she instructs her audience to “click, clap, or smile" in order to engage with the Palestinian narrative. The paper weaves together performance studies and body politics in order to examine the interplay between the spoken word and storytelling, on the one hand, as well as facial expressions, voice, movements, and audience engagement as integral to the performed art, on the other. The paper also examines the negotiation between art and politics as well as the aesthetic value of performance poetry and its socio-political implications on the other through different approaches to Aesthetics theory with particular reference to R.G. Collingwood and Marshall McLuhan. Moreover, it explores the social, political, and lived aspects of aesthetics that the performance poet attempts to illuminate by drawing attention to the networks of solidarity within and without the Palestinian community.

DOI

10.21608/ttaip.2020.133418

Authors

First Name

Amany

Last Name

Elnahhas

MiddleName

-

Affiliation

Department of English, Faculty of Arts, Helwan University, Egypt.

Email

amanyelnahhas@arts.helwan.edu.eg

City

-

Orcid

-

Volume

2

Article Issue

1

Related Issue

19909

Issue Date

2020-12-01

Receive Date

2020-05-01

Publish Date

2020-12-01

Page Start

82

Page End

100

Print ISSN

2636-4069

Online ISSN

2735-3451

Link

https://ttaip.journals.ekb.eg/article_133418.html

Detail API

https://ttaip.journals.ekb.eg/service?article_code=133418

Order

5

Type

Original Article

Type Code

1,357

Publication Type

Journal

Publication Title

Textual Turnings: An International Peer-Reviewed Journal in English Studies

Publication Link

https://ttaip.journals.ekb.eg/

MainTitle

“We’re Holding our Ground”: Body Politics, Verbal/Non-Verbal Performance, and Dissent Aesthetics in Rafeef Ziadah’s Performance Poetry

Details

Type

Article

Created At

23 Jan 2023