The Center for Palestine Studies is thrilled to announce Alessandra Amin as the incoming Ibrahim Abu-Lughod Fellow!
Alessandra Amin is working on her first book project, Mother Figure: Art and the Palestinian Dream-State, 1965-1982, which looks to an era of history bookended by the launch of the Palestinian Revolution and the demolition of its epicenter in Beirut. The study considers how modern Palestinian art assumed new aesthetic and philosophical valences during this period, charting the emergence of the dream and the maternal body as nested modes of relating to Palestine in painting and graphic arts. Drawing on multi-sited archival and ethnographic research in Arabic, English, and French, it establishes the “dream-state” as a historically situated framework for conceptualizing Palestine, arguing that the language of dreaming negotiates the reckless hope of the revolutionary moment with the profoundly disorienting experiences of exile and erasure. Crucially, this framework marks Palestine’s difference from nations that exist in sovereign, territorialized form; for Palestinians, unlike citizens of self-determined countries, “imagining” the nation is not a subconscious means of belonging to a social group but a complex act of mourning, speculation, resistance, and survival. Focusing primarily on the work of Mustafa Hallaj, Samira Badran, Ismail Shammout, and Juliana Seraphim, Mother Figure brings established nationalist aesthetics into conversation with previously understudied imaginaries of surrealism and science-fiction through the ubiquitous form of the maternal body. More than a motif, this form is a central prism whose diverse facets reflect the hopes and anxieties of the nascent dream-state.
Alessandra will receive her doctorate in Art History from UCLA in June 2022. Her work has been supported by the Social Science Research Council, Darat al-Funun-The Khalid Shoman Foundation, the Palestinian American Research Center, and the U.S. Department of Education.
Alessandra will be in residence at the Center for Academic Year 2022-23.