Overview

The title of Dan Monk's book, An Aesthetic Occupation refers to the attributions by the combatants on both sides of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict of political content to the sacred structures in the contested area, and to the ongoing inseparability within the conflict of architectural form and violence. Monk combines groundbreaking archival research with theoretical insights to trace the history of what he calls a ""politics of monuments"" during the ""Mandate era,"" the period in the first half of the twentieth century when Britain exercised a measure of sovereignty over Palestine. Monk argues that those monuments that seem to repeatedly trigger outbursts of violence do not have the architectural immediacy attributed to them: they are not inherently political. Instead, political significance and content are endlessly projected onto them by those on both sides of the conflict. The legacy of General Charles George Gordon, a late-nineteenth-century British imperialist whose study of Palestinian holy sites, Monk argues, signalled the shift from focusing on the uses of the spaces to the claims for those uses. It is here, he claims, that sacred spaces became sites for rewriting the cultural politics of Modernity. Drawing on the unpublished archives of the family of Ernest Tatham Richmond, an architect and former Chief Secretary for Political Affairs to the British government in Palestine, Monk relates to the restoration of the Dome of the Rock to what he deems the chief historical crisis of architecture-that politics is presumed to use representations of holiness as fronts for its secular goals. The discourse following the violent Wailing Wall riots of 1929, when the opponents in Palestine were compelled to explain their own national imperatives through duelling interpretations of the cause of the conflict serves to demonstrate how the interpretations of others are reinterpreted, which constitutes the ultimate paradox of politics.

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9780822328032

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Reviews

A revelatory history of the architectural construction of the Israel/Palestine conflict that is also a stunningly original contribution to critical theory in the tradition of Adorno and Benjamin. Monk shows how both sides-thanks in part to the British-became trapped in a deadly quicksand of sacralized geographies and imagined histories. -Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz Why is the question of Israel/Palestine so intractable? Why, in this supposedly enlightened, secular age, does there seem to be no exit from a conflict that has focussed obsessively on the material features of this tiny country for millennia? How is it that the very stones, monuments, and landscape have become so invested with conflicting values that they seem to have 'lives of their own' that are not simply shaped by historical events, but themselves play the role of causal agents in those events? Daniel Monk's brilliant and profound meditation on these questions eschews all the easy alternatives: it avoids the temptation both of one-sided polemics (on the one hand) and Olympian neutrality (on the other); it refuses to pass over the fetishizing of monuments and places as a mere symptom that could be dispelled by critique; above all, it insists on looking steadily at the objects themselves in all their paradoxical, conflicted formulations, their positioning in events, memories of events, and fantasies of a final event to come. This is an essential book for anyone who wants to think about the Holy Land, or about the way objects make and are made by history. -W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago, Editor, Critical Inquiry

A revelatory history of the architectural construction of the Israel/Palestine conflict that is also a stunningly original contribution to critical theory in the tradition of Adorno and Benjamin. Monk shows how both sides - thanks in part to the British - became trapped in a deadly quicksand of sacralised geographies and imagined histories. - Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz

Author Information

Daniel Bertrand Monk is George T. and Myra W. Cooley Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies and Director, Peace and Conflict Studies Program [P-CON] at Colgate University.

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