Articulations: Settler Colonialism, Dispossession and Arts
Abushama’s training in geography is highly interdisciplinary and engages with debates in urban geography, settler colonial and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and development geographies. He has three developing research projects. The first is his monograph Cities and the Settler Colony, which examines Palestinian cultural productions in Haifa and Ramallah. The monograph takes the cities as two connected yet distinctly different sites in the production of global capitalism and settler colonialism. It looks at everyday processes of cultural production (theatre, music, and visual arts) and their intertwinement with processes of market reconfiguration, gentrification, and racialization following the neoliberalisation of Israel in 1985. The second project extends the analysis of cultural processes and the built environment back to Europe of the early twentieth century to examine a curious link between Dada arts and Zionism. The project examines the constitutive, spatial role of Dada co-founder Marcel Janco in the burial of Palestinian villages in relation to Dada’s earlier, ambivalent dependency on colonialism and its theft of artworks. The third project is in the early stages and focuses on everyday processes of cultural production as entry points into examining the Arab Gulf’s rising cultural hegemony. Against the backdrop of the burgeoning literature on the Arab Gulf’s political economy, the project aims to fill a major lacuna in the literature by examining cultural processes in the Gulf and their intertwinement with capital and regional economic development.
Abushama also has an enthusiastic interest in food as a practice and archive and works closely with the Kitchen Marronage collective as a chef-in-residence, curating recipes, food seminars, and collaborations.