Subjection and Performance: Tourism, Witnessing, and Acts of Refusal in Palestine

Drawing from multi-sited ethnographic research on solidarity tours in Palestine, this essay shows how Palestinian solidarity tour guides reject performing subjection in an industry that treats the recitation of subjection as a prerequisite. Building from feminist analyses of colonial knowledge production, I first detail how epistemic violence shapes tourists' expectations of Palestine and predetermines how they understand Palestinian freedom struggles. On solidarity tours, Palestinians are expected to rehearse their displacement and provide evidence of their (extremely well-documented) dispossession against a constellation of US and Israeli state sanctioned narratives that have rendered them unreliable narrators. Working at the intersections of Palestinian studies, critical tourism studies, feminist studies, and decolonial ethnography, I then document how Palestinian tour guides disrupt tourist expectations by refusing to perform subjection for the tourist gaze. In alternative performances of pleasure and through acts of "hanging out," Palestinian tour guides intervene in tourist desire for a performance of trauma and instead ask tourists to confront the violences of their own expectations and assumptions. I thus explore how solidarity tourists and Palestinian organizers struggle, on uneven terrain, to craft an anti-colonial movement outside of a strictly witness/witnessed relationship and despite the epistemic violence and settler logics that structure their encounter.