Laughter 'In Between' Time: Temporality, Iconography, and the Burden of Proof in Palestinian Art After Oslo

In this age of accelerated globalisation and intensified international mobility, many of us find ourselves occupying spaces between ‘here’ and ‘there’. For those that are fortunate enough to hold the right passport, these liminal spaces are typically associated with airport transit lounges. For others, born in particular places and to particular parents, these spaces take on a different permanence as ‘host’ countries, camps and detention facilities. And yet, a familiar social experience cuts across the chasm that separates these spaces, wherein when one happens to come across a stranger that calls the same place home, one of the first things they do is share a joke about where it is that they are from. It is in these often-brief exchanges, that we perform a clear litmus test of our identities. Indicating to others not only our social openness toward them, but also perhaps more importantly, our possession of shared cultural information and collective identity.

Humour thus serves to rapidly draw a line of connection between people who are otherwise strangers, forging a swift sense of intimacy grounded by a sense of a common understanding of the world. Laughter shared between those compatriots can therefore be understood as akin to sharing a code of cultural distinctiveness. Philosopher Simon Critchley poignantly describes exchanges of this sort writing that ‘we wear our cultural distinctiveness like an insulation layer against the surrounding alien environment. It warms us up when all else is cold and unfamiliar’.2 Critchley’s observation sparks an even deeper and more particular question: what then is the capacity of laughter for people, such as the Palestinians, who face an experience described with that heaviest of words - exile? Which is also to say, what does humour achieve in the face of generations of dispossession, refugeedom, and the experience of collective trauma?