The bantustan sublime: reframing the colonial in Ramallah

Abstract

Ramallah has emerged as the de facto capital of a truncated Palestinian proto‐state. The centralization of economic, political, cultural and recreational activity, the influx of migrants and diasporic returnees, the rise of new middle classes and a relative social openness all signal the possibility of the nucleus of real urbanity. The rhythms and patterns of everyday urban life are palpable; cultural and sub‐cultural life are pronounced and women have achieved a relative degree of social and spatial freedom. Yet Ramallah is a city under siege—encamped and militarily surrounded. It exists in a curious liminality: tethered between indirect colonial occupation and the restless mobilization of local urbanity—neither directly occupied nor free, besieged but somehow vibrant. In its spatialization of new Palestinian wealth and power Ramallah has rewritten the coordinates of local politics, generated new class and professional interests and forged new consumption‐based subjectivities. Here, an elite‐driven production of space intertwines with and often complements the changing mechanisms and tools of Israeli control by reinforcing a burgeoning ‘regime of normalization’. The city has begun to detach from wider scales of action and concern. Centralization, in this case, means an increased bantustanization and the disintegration of national strategy in return for local and contained micro‐freedoms. The self‐styled capital of the state‐to‐come becomes a node in the consolidation of precisely the colonial structures that will indefinitely delay such a realization. In this the most stark and physical manifestation of the singularity of ‘post‐colonial colonialism’ a transience, at the heart of the crisis of Palestinian politics, consolidates: reality is suspended; national fates deferred; a solution postponed.