Rethinking conviviality

Materiality, sociability, and power in Israel/Palestine

Bibliographic Data

ID19003698
AuthorsJoel Hart (0000-0002-6491-6451, Queen Mary University of London, corresponding author)
Year2022
Volume45
Issue16
Pages684-707
Publication date2022-08-02
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueEthnic and Racial Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9870 • E-ISSN: 1466-4356
PublisherRoutledge (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1080/01419870.2022.2105657
OpenAlexW4289443397
LanguageEN
Citations received2
References cited46

Conviviality has developed as a framework for interpreting everyday social life in diverse urban contexts, but the entanglement of power with convivial social interactions remains underexplored. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the urban margins of Jaffa, contemporary Israel, this article engages this dearth through an analysis of the relationship between the materiality of the built environment and everyday social interaction, building on an existing literature that makes this connection. Following the mass exodus of Palestinians from Jaffa in 1948 and decades of housing construction and state-generated migration to Jaffa by the Israeli state, the city’s dense urban periphery illustrates the concurrence of uneven material and legal infrastructures, deceptive discourses, and everyday sociability between inhabitants. Thus, the article suggests a reengagement with a conceptualization of conviviality made decades earlier. Applied to Jaffa, Mbembe’s argument indicates ways in which conviviality can be a register of power

Aesthetics · Argument (complex analysis) · Art · Conceptualization · Ethnography · Everyday life · Materiality (auditing) · Palestine · Political science · Power (physics) · Sociology · State (computer science) · Anthropology · Gender Studies · History · Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies · Law · Public Spaces through Art · Urban Planning and Governance

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