Recalcitrance and Dignity: Liberatory Imagination in Palestine

Confronted with a system of colonial control that polices everything from political organising to poetry published on personal social media pages, Palestinians have long engaged in forms of refusal, including recalcitrance. Recalcitrance is a type of dissent from oppressive and violent systems; like refusal, it produces a new political space beyond the restrictive dominant frameworks which maintain power asymmetries, instead centring Indigenous dignity and knowledge both on the individual and collective levels. The author reads Dareen Tatour’s poem, ‘Resist, my people, resist them’, as an act of recalcitrance both drawing on and reinforcing Palestinian collectivity, and as a call for a rejection of the current social and political reality under Zionism. I then consider the broader historical and contemporary role of Palestinian women in enacting political and social interventions through recalcitrance and refusal in service of a liberatory Palestinian imagination.