Stitched together,torn apart: The keffiyeh as cultural guide

Introduction: a thankless cause

Years ago Edward W. Said wrote, ‘Palestine is a thankless cause. Palestine is the cruelest, most difficult cause to uphold, not because it is unjust, but because it is just and yet dangerous to speak about … honestly and concretely’ (Said, 2000: xviii). These words remain true today, as the United Nations Security Council recently voted to affirm the obvious: that Israel’s settlements in Occupied Palestine are illegal (UNSC, 2016). This passed with 14 out of 15 affirmative votes, with the one exception being the US, which simply abstained. The consequences for this abstention? The Republican controlled Senate is putting forth a bill to cease all US funding contributions to the United Nations (UN) (Shelbourne, 2017). Such rending of global solidarity is only set to increase as the new US presidential administration’s choice for ambassador to the UN stated, during her confirmation hearing, the following a propos of the Security Council’s resolution: ‘Nowhere has the UN’s failure been more consistent and more outrageous than in its bias against our close ally Israel’ (Fishel, 2017). Furthermore, the new administration’s choice for ambassador to Israel has asseverated his desire to move the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, a move Roger Cohen (2017) has described as nothing short of ‘pyromania’. The new US President himself has tweeted that the UN is just a ‘club to get together, talk, and have a good time. So sad!’ (Trump, 2016). Rashid Khalidi (2017) notes that with, ‘the advent in Washington of an Administration with radical new priorities regarding Israel, and a disdain for Palestinian rights, Palestine is facing a daunting reality’. Indeed, Palestine remains a ‘thankless cause’.

The vitriol surrounding Palestine is a microcosm of the broader intellectual, political economic – in short, cultural – context in which we now live. For Daniel Rodgers, this ‘age of fracture’ can be analyzed if we pay attention to certain ‘acts of mind and imagination and the way in which they changed America’ (2011: 10). While the political and cultural importance of the keffiyeh, ¹ as well as its attendant commodification as a fashion accessory in the West, is established, this article analyzes the precise theoretical coordinates of the cultural artifact’s affective power. That is, we know what cultural work the keffiyeh does, but to go beyond Althusser’s ‘aleatory conjecture’, and the ‘embarrassingly neutral yet omnipresent term context’ (Jameson, 2016: 434), we show how that work is carried out, its theoretical underpinnings, and its implications for better understanding the interrelationship between current events, the ideological, and the cultural. Indeed, the keffiyeh is used here as a specific theoretical vehicle that may elucidate the broader implications for cultural studies internationally.

We contend that a useful way to understand what is happening here is to follow Fredric Jameson’s (2016: 432) advice to utilize a three-pronged analytical matrix, paying due attention to the current, the ideological, and the cultural. Scholars have illustrated that Palestinian calls for social justice are global in nature (Chamberlin, 2011), and that clothing in the Middle East is highly political (Shirazi-Mahajan, 1993). Writing in these pages, Faegheh Shirazi and Smeeta Mishra (2010) have shown the politico-cultural complexities of the niqab (face veil) in the West by analyzing its symbolic nature, and the differences immanent in the dominant media representation versus the interpretation(s) of its actual wearer. The current article focuses on the black/white checkered keffiyeh pertaining to Palestinian rights, and associated ideals of social justice. This is a cultural artifact of serious political importance. Others (Salem, 2008; Schwartz-DuPre and Scott 2015; Swedenburg, 1990, 1992, 2009) have shown the cultural and political importance of the keffiyeh, that is, what the keffiyeh is about, as well as its commodification in the West. For example, the keffiyeh has been situated within the framework of:

politics, fashion, and terrorism, in order to highlight the various ways in which the global mobility of an object may concurrently repress history and provide space for cultural resistance. In this vein, the kufiyya-wearing Westerner can simultaneously signify a consumerist form of global chic and a progressive opposition to imperialism. (Schwartz-DuPre and Scott, 2015: 337)

Our critical move is to show how this process works, and to link it to broader politico-cultural trends.

While the keffiyeh began as a mainly utilitarian accessory, good for keeping the sun and dust off one’s face while tending to an olive grove, it soon came to symbolize Palestinian rights (Abed al-Samith, 1987; Shirazi-Mahajan 1993; Swedenburg 1990, 1992; Weir, 1989). Faegheh Shirazi-Mahajan shows how the meaning of the keffiyeh changed over time and is worth quoting at length:

In Palestinian society, until the 1920s, Bedouin men were distinguished from villagers and urban dwellers by their headgear, hattah or keffiyeh.… [S]ignificant changes in the style of men’s headwear took place in the 1930s, when the keffiyeh and agal were adopted by many villagers and townsmen as an expression of Palestinian nationalism. Later, Yasser Arafat … adopted a specific black and white keffiyeh.…This newly acquired symbol of Palestinian liberation took a new and significant meaning; it became a symbol of Palestinian national identity.…The black and white pattern became a popular motif in everyday Palestinian art and life where its meaning is understood as a sign of struggle for political identity among those who are familiar with the Palestinian situation. (1993: 57–8)

Far from the popular image in the US, which imagines that wearing such attire is prima facie support for terrorism, the keffiyeh is a symbol of solidarity for the pursuit of social justice under occupation by Israel. As a LexisNexis search on ‘keffiyeh’ demonstrates, the dominant US media outlets portray this cultural accoutrement as malevolent and automatically terror-related. A search of the last five years using the terms ‘keffiyeh’ and ‘social justice’ yields 10 results, but a search using ‘keffiyeh’ and ‘terrorist’ receives 202 entries. ² At the same time, we readily concede that it is obvious that not everyone who wears the keffiyeh is cognizant of (or even cares about) the political meaning behind it; it is precisely the affective phenomena analyzed below that allow for, even demand, the commodification of that particular item. Perceptions create feelings, and emotions, which Rei Terada (2001: 8) has shown become ‘perceptible as a discourse’. Perceptions, whether ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ work to construct the spectator’s, as well as the actor’s, reality, which is why ‘perspective has important implications for how we conceive the world that surrounds us’ (Damasio, 2003: 198). What to make of this cultural (in)compatibility? The East/West dichotomy is in play, as we move from the crucial political element of the keffiyeh to its sterilized Other in an Orientalist maneuver whereby the Occident’s privilege strains the political from the cultural, allowing only the fashionable (and billable) to accessorize the body. In the words of Jody Berland: ‘As the production of meaning is located in the activities and agencies of audiences, the topography of consumption is increasingly identified as (and thus expanded to stand in for) the map of the social’ (1992: 42).

Symbolic interactionism

In order to look at the cultural work undertaken by the keffiyeh, we follow Shirazi-Mahajan (1993) use of symbolic interactionism in her exploration of the hijab. The keffiyeh fits neatly into this paradigm, which Susan Kaiser explains in her canonical The Social Psychology of Clothing (1997). Kaiser shows that ‘clothes influence how we represent our identities … interact with others … and are influenced by, and contribute to, the cultures and time in which we live’ (1997: vii). The symbolic interactionist model indicates that ‘humans create their own realities, in part, by managing their appearance; to fit their lines of action together, people use symbols; and meanings associated with these symbols emerge from social interactions with others’ (1997: 41–2).

Erving Goffman’s work is also useful in understanding how the keffiyeh works as a social identifier. The keffiyeh as a symbol for social justice has an obvious place where Goffman writes: ‘Individuals, like other objects in this world, affect the surrounding environment in a manner congruent with their own actions and properties, their mere presence produces signs and marks. Individuals, in brief, exude expressions’ (1969: 4–5). One need only think of the groups of keffiyeh-wearing, occupied Palestinians, facing the well-equipped splendor of the US-backed Israeli army, to understand the meaning of ‘individuals exuding expression’. In this scene, the keffiyeh is symbolizing solidarity for social justice, just as much as any verbal chant. Thus, this wearable object acts as a silent communicator and is capable of sending political messages to the audience that is fluent in its language.

This mental picture also brings us to the concept of ‘teams’, where teams support ‘an individual’s performance’ (Hare and Blumberg, 1988: 37). That group of dispossessed Palestinians is indeed a team with a common cause. Each individual is buttressing the other’s role in this effort – with the keffiyeh being a political signifier. As Goffman notes: ‘the definition of the situation projected by a particular participant is an integral part of a projection that is fostered and sustained by the intimate co-operation of more than one participant’ (1958: 47). In other words, the Palestinian movement for social justice depends on the participation of many people working towards a shared goal. What makes keffiyeh-wearing people out supporting Palestine a team, rather than just a group of individuals? Goffman answers by writing: ‘A teammate is someone whose dramaturgical co-operation one is dependent upon in fostering a given definition of the situation’ (1958: 51). In keeping with our example, it is clear that the protesting Palestinians are highly dependent on each other in this dynamic and dangerous situation, and that individuals become a communal team partly through the keffiyeh’s symbolism. This distinction, between individual and community, becomes vitally important when we analyze the keffiyeh’s assimilation in the Occident, as the reverse occurs (whereby the communal becomes individualized), with implications for how culture operates.

Orientalism at work: Western images and imaginations of the keffiyeh

In this section, we focus on the West’s perspective on the keffiyeh, not to force a particular theoretical perspective on the keffiyeh, but rather to show how it is (mis)understood in the Occident. After all, perception is driven by media discourse, and perception drives the reality of politics. Where there is widespread cultural misunderstanding, there is likely to be widespread political problematics. Assessing the state of the dominant discourse in the West (but especially the US) Rosemary Ruether writes: ‘The image of the Palestinian in the Western press is that of the keffiyeh-wrapped “terrorist.” The keffiyeh-wrapped farmer trying to survive in his rocky and dwindling olive orchards in occupied Palestine is unseen’ (1987: 587). The dominance of this view is crucial in understanding the keffiyeh’s cultural placement within the broader ideological movement that has become ascendant in the West over the past 30–40 years.

In The Cultural Politics of Emotion, Sara Ahmed discusses the concept of the ‘metonymic slide’, where, through lexical choices and framing in the dominant discourse, the general becomes identified with the particular. For Ahmed, ‘mixed race couplings and immigration become readable as (like) forms of rape or molestation; an invasion of the body of the nation’ (2004: 44). The keffiyeh works similarly. The West, for the most part, either discursively interweaves the fabric with terrorism by way of anti-Arab racism, or leaches the item of all political symbolism rendering it as nothing more than a fashionable accessory for the hip. This again parallels the pattern of the hijab/niqab in Western politico-cultural discourse, where the hijab is fetishized as erotica, or the niqab is read as embracing submissiveness, or even banned as in France. When either of these maneuvers (neutralization as fashion, or politicization as threat) is violated, the transgressor pays a price. In this way, global capitalism polices itself politically and culturally. This process began in earnest with the rise of Reagan–Thatcher, and the associated project of neoliberalism. From there, the 2000s brought the invasion of Iraq, regimens of torture, and globalized black sites. With the end of the 2000s, the stage was set for the destabilization of the Arab Spring, dictatorial overthrows as well as their autocratic replacements, and ongoing civil wars. Through it all, the keffiyeh has traveled, worn by the oppressed subaltern as well as the moneyed westerner. The journey of the keffiyeh may be read as a global cultural trek through a geopolitical metamorphosis ending with the empowerment of a new sort of ideology.

While in contemporary Palestine, the politicized keffiyeh is used to symbolize solidarity in the face of oppression, its use in the West is very different from, and in fact becomes oppositional to, the liberating project. As for Israel, it only recognizes the keffiyeh as a symbol for terrorism – so much so, that when Israel conducts emergency drills, it has the ‘terrorists’ wear keffiyehs:

Stun grenades exploded as yellow smoke billowed from the school’s basketball court so as to simulate a chemical attack. Thousands of security personnel are participating in the two-day exercise. Two armed men wearing red and white keffiyehs and signs saying ‘terrorist’ stormed the school. Soldiers acting as students shrieked and ran collapsing as they wiped their eyes in mock pain. (Stoil and Katz, 2007; italics added)

The effect of such a spectacle on the onlookers, including schoolchildren, only serves to intensify Sianne Ngai’s (2005) concept of ‘ugly feelings’, which makes the likelihood for peace so small. One is, for example, ‘disgusted’ with terrorists (which the keffiyeh in this case becomes incontrovertibly associated with), and ‘disgust finds its object intolerable and demands its exclusion’ (Ngai, 2005: 337). This results in apartheid policies and the very settlement activities (inherently exclusionary) that were recently condemned by the UN Security Council (2016). The powerful affective framing here then is: terrorists wear keffiyehs; Palestinians wear keffiyehs; ergo Palestinians are terrorists. As the Israeli government refuses to perceive the keffiyeh as anything other than attire worn by terrorists, so the refusal to accept legitimate grievances of an occupied people.

The keffiyeh’s travels here are in tandem with salient political changes operative both in the context of Israel/Palestine, as well as globally. From Israel’s kibbutzim/socialist experimental founding, the keffiyeh is there, along with the olive farming Palestinian native; through the fracturing of the 1980s and rapidly changing economic imperatives, the keffiyeh is there, along with the exploding violence of the Intifada and state security crackdowns; and with the obliteration of solidarity for social justice, along with the victory of the far right, the keffiyeh is there – its uses and perceptions dependent upon, in these cases, the political proclivities of its wearer and its audience.

For years, the individual manifestation – the personification of the ‘metonymic slide’ par excellence – of Palestinian resistance was Yasser Arafat, and the vituperations heaped upon him by the western press are difficult to overstate. In one emblematic column by John Downing in the Toronto Sun entitled, ‘Palestinian Leader Left Legacy of Evil; Yasser Arafat Could Have Said “Yes” at Camp David, but Chose to Wallow in Hatred Instead’ (2004), the reader is exposed to a torrent of attacks on the deceased leader such as:

his legacy is laced with evil. He has so poisoned the future that murderous brawling, if not civil war, will occupy the many Palestinian factions where there are, because of him, more radicals than moderates, and no one capable of unity…. He dreamed of greatness as a modern Saladin, so he adopted a checkered keffiyeh and hip pistol.

The essential point here concerns the western press’s near constant association of the keffiyeh with terrorism in order to meet a political goal: assuring that what the keffiyeh symbolizes – solidarity for Palestinian independence – is quashed before it can become. The tendency to associate that which ‘we’ oppose with terrorism reached a new crescendo in the aftermath of Al Qaeda’s 2001 attack on the US, and only grew in affective power in the ensuing years. ‘Terrorism’, once applied, renders the subject (whether person or item) unable to speak, or be heard, or be seen – the label is at once a muzzle for the political and a cultural vaporizer insofar as its affective power is invincible once attached. In this way ‘terrorism’ becomes what Deleuze and Guattari call an ‘order word’, and is an example of ‘language [that] is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience’ (1987: 76).

Stitched together: keffiyeh as symbol for solidarity and social justice

As is evident from the works of Kaiser and Goffman already discussed, an individual creates his or her own reality partly by what he or she wears. This is a vital concept to understand when thinking about the keffiyeh’s meaning in culture and global politics. Without an individual attaching meaning to the fabric as a symbol for social justice, the keffiyeh is left with only pedestrian duties, whether protection from the elements or fashion.

The following account shows two attributes of the keffiyeh at once. One is the fact that no longer is the keffiyeh exclusively for men. Indeed, all who are dedicated to independence from occupation wear the black and white keffiyeh, regardless of sex, ethnicity, religion or geography:

‘Golan is Syrian, Palestine is Arab’, chanted men young and old. A girl wearing a black and white keffiyeh waved an enormous Syrian flag as she stood next to the square’s statue: a tall bronze of Sultan al-Atrash who led a Syrian revolt against the French waving a sword in the air. (Halpern, 2006)

In order to emphasize the genderless nature of the keffiyeh, the following account of a mother wearing the black and white keffiyeh on International Women’s Day is illuminating:

Palestinian women celebrate this day in their own way…. In the occupied Palestinian territories, women gathered near the Israeli military checkpoints to protest against the siege and the closure of Palestinian cities. Amongst these protestors was Um Ahmad, 68. She wore … a black-and-white ‘keffiyeh’ on her head … and held high a picture of … her son ‘Hammouda’, 22, who is serving two life sentences in Israeli jails. Um Ahmad said that her sole wish was to see her son again in her lifetime, referring to the fact that the Israeli authorities have prevented her from visiting her son in jail. (Ma’an News Agency, 2007)

Clearly, we see the relevance of symbolic interactionism (Denzin, 1970) in this situation, where the women are behaving as a team with a common goal, each understanding the importance of their acts of solidarity and the symbolism conveyed through that (not-so) simple fabric: the keffiyeh. If they did not fully comprehend this, it is difficult to believe that they would be risking their own safety, as the Israel Defense Force has been known to use lethal force against unarmed civilians (UN Human Rights Council, 2009).

The cultural importance of the keffiyeh is also understood by those Israeli settlers who seek political domination. In one such West Bank settlement, the ‘inhabitants had gained a reputation for aggressive behavior toward their Palestinian neighbors’, and had beaten and robbed the 70-year-old Haj Aziz abd al-Karim Salman Hneini three times:

to thoroughly humiliate me, they pulled off my keffiyeh and headband and made off with them.… A man of my age and standing in the community – I am considered one of the village dignitaries – would never appear in public without them. (Friedman, 2006)

This example shows that the Israeli settlers fully comprehend the message of social justice symbolized by the keffiyeh. The intentional and repeated stealing of the old man’s keffiyeh should be read as the very essence of a politico-cultural crime. Such criminals go to the trouble of taking a piece of cloth with no monetary value in order to send the message that such a symbol of solidarity will not be tolerated in the area.

Another example not found in the US press, is that of an ‘Oktoberfest’ celebration in the occupied village of Taybeh. Not only is one of the very few microbreweries in the Middle East found there, but people of Jewish, Muslim and Christian faiths are able to have fun together:

The people of Taybeh were keen to stress their Arab and Palestinian identity. Father Raed told his congregation at church on Sunday to act like the disciple Peter, like a rock, and demonstrate their loyalty. Palestinian flags and the black and white keffiyehs were abundant … (Ma’an News Agency, 2006a; italics added)

Of crucial importance for the purposes of this article is the fact that Christians were wearing the keffiyeh. Fredric Jameson reminds us: ‘For culture – the weaker, more secular version of that thing called religion – is not a “substance” or a phenomenon in its own right, it is an objective mirage that arises out of the relationship between at least two groups’ (Jameson, 1993: 33). Indeed, one of our primary points is that no religious, or ethnic, group holds a monopoly on the keffiyeh. While credit rightfully goes to the Arab people for being the first to wear it, we must also recognize that no one group of people can legitimately claim possession of the symbolic ideals of solidarity and social justice attached to the keffiyeh.

The universality of these ideals is found even in the circus. Indeed, the first Palestinian circus in Bethlehem made symbolic use of the keffiyeh. Here is one scene of ‘a particular Palestinian flavour’:

the artists form a wall of bodies and then slowly, one by one, each artist breaks through the wall. One of the artists is used a battering ram to knock down the remains of the wall. The trapeze artists, who fly through the air in symbolic freedom, wear Palestinian keffiyehs around their middles. (Ma’an News Agency 2006b)

Here we see the symbolism of knocking down the barrier wall, which the International Court of Justice has deemed ‘illegal’ (International Court of Justice, 2004). Even within a social context of something so fundamentally nonpolitical as a circus, we see the prominence and allegorical nature of the keffiyeh being used in the pursuit of a political goal.

While people of different religious faiths, men and women all wear the keffiyeh for solidarity and social justice, it should also be noted that the keffiyeh can be used outside the Middle East in the same way. At university campuses across the West, for instance, we see solidarity movements for Palestinian rights reported as in the following example.

A controversial pro-Palestinian student conference went ahead calmly yesterday, a week after the University of Toronto cancelled it over concerns those with dissenting views were being excluded. About 60 students, many draped in the traditional keffiyeh scarf, showed up to attend a daylong workshop aimed at planning pro-Palestinian events over the next six months. Three uniformed Toronto police officers stood conspicuously in the meeting room, but there wasn’t so much as a flag waving in protest as participants filed in. (Canadian Press, 2003)

Like most of the narratives used in this article, the above news story allows the reader to glean multiple points at once. For instance, the inclusion of the word ‘controversial’ with ‘pro-Palestinian’ immediately alerts the reader that any organization that would concern itself with freeing Palestine from an illegal occupation should be thought of in extremely cautious terms. The word ‘controversial’ is also telling readers, especially those (undoubtedly the vast majority of westerners) without a detailed understanding of the conflict in question, that a ‘pro-Palestinian’ group does not have official backing and therefore should not be trusted.

Indeed, on one level, the keffiyeh is a ‘stitched together’ cultural symbol of global proportions. In the words of Edward Said:

We have to see the Arab world generally and Palestine in particular in more comparative and critical ways.… The Palestinian struggle for justice is especially something with which one must express solidarity, rather than endless criticism and exasperated frustrating discouragement, or crippling divisiveness. Remember the solidarity here and everywhere in Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia and Australia, and remember also that there is a cause to which many people have committed themselves, difficulties and terrible obstacles notwithstanding. Why? Because it is a just cause, a noble ideal, a moral quest for equality and human rights. (Said, 2003: np)

Torn apart: ripping the keffiyeh, fracturing culture and the triumph of the right

Following the dictates of neoliberalism, and as other scholars have noted, the keffiyeh has largely, though by no means entirely, been commodified by western fashionistas and hipsters (Salem, 2008; Schwartz-DuPre and Scott, 2015). In so doing, its political power analyzed above has in many cases been leached from its fabric. But what does this say about how culture works? For one, it tells us about the sort of control that is immanent in global capitalism. Indeed, as Patricia Clough notes in The Affective Turn, this ‘control is linked to the tendency in capitalism toward what Marx referred to as real subsumption, where capital shifts its domain of accumulation to life itself, to preindividual bodily capacities, so that value is produced through modulating affect’ (2007: 20). The monetary value here, the only sort of value recognized by capitalism, depends upon devaluing the politico-cultural aspects that made and make the keffiyeh an important symbol for solidarity. As Theodor Adorno suggests, ‘The mechanism for reproducing life, for dominating and destroying it, is exactly the same, and accordingly industry, state and advertising are amalgamated’ (2005 [1954]: 53). If recognized as political, the value for sales desiccates, as no entity, corporeal or corporate, wishes for any label affiliated with ‘terrorism’. Ngai provides additional theoretical weight on this point with respect to tolerance in the neoliberal project, ‘the object of tolerance in any affluent market-centered democracy is perceived to be harmless or relatively unthreatening. Its ability to be tolerated in this sociopolitical context thus becomes an index of its sociopolitical ineffectuality – in particular, its ineffectuality as a mechanism for dissent and change’ (2005: 341–2; original emphasis).

An important article in Canada’s National Post on the subject of the keffiyeh being assimilated into a consumer product for fashion reasons entitled, ‘You say keffiyeh, I say shemagh; Urban Outfitters; can keffiyehs ever be just a fashion statement?’ (Burshtein, 2007) is worth discussing at length, as it illustrates much of concern. The fashion critic writes of the trendy clothing store, Urban Outfitters, selling the keffiyeh in an assortment of colors. This brought rebukes from the pro-Israel community, ‘Some in the pro-Israel faction accused the retailers of marketing terrorism. “They have the chutzpah to market them as ‘anti-war scarves’, [wrote one in] a popular blog for Jewish youth’. Likewise the pro-Palestine community, who ‘argued that turning the keffiyeh into a fashion accessory for hipster wannabes trivialized their cause’. The end result of this controversy was the chain’s president ordering the removal of the keffiyeh from the stores, issuing an apology, and stating that there was no intent to ‘imply any sympathy for or support of terrorists or terrorism’ (Lando, 2007). This fits a pattern, as Dunkin Donuts pulled their commercial with Rachel Ray wearing a keffiyeh, after much complaint by commentators like Michelle Malkin, who said the garment ‘has come to symbolize murderous Palestinian jihad’ (Shea, 2008).

In order to show the globalization of the keffiyeh, and the lack of political awareness of those wearing it, Burshtein then writes that:

when I was in London recently, I noticed keffiyehs being sported by all manner of the fashion conscious – from the guy with a Hugh Grant haircut and Louis Vuitton case alighting from the Eurostar at Waterloo station to the arty chick at the Tate Modern to the fashionista browsing on Oxford Street wearing one with her kind’s standard: black blazer, black skinny jeans, black ballerina slippers.

Finally, she notes that:

for all the outrage … there is probably considerably less political meaning to the keffiyeh trend than each side of the political debate is giving it. I think it’s not that much different than any other cultural item – like cowboy boots or a tunic – that fashion co-opts as a trend, usually for its exoticism and maybe sense of insiderness and which eventually becomes pretty much drained of any cultural association. (emphasis added)

Another article, in the International Herald Tribune, entitled ‘Scarf morphs into iconic accessory’ (Young, 2006), describes the emergence of the keffiyeh in Reykjavik, Iceland. The article discusses how:

The black and white or red and white keffiyeh has had popular appeal among people in various countercultures in the West for some time, but only recently has it begun to gain status in some fashionable circles as a cool accessory. ‘It was originally worn out of empathy with the Palestinian cause, and then picked up by many more men who had absolutely no idea of its political connotations’, says Dylan Jones, chief editor of British GQ.

In the same article we also find a notable quote illustrating the literal leaching of all political meaning from the keffiyeh from ‘an American jeweler living in Paris’, who states that, ‘It really developed into a style. I have two. One amazing multicolored one from Jordan and another red and white one that I’ve dyed hot pink’. We even see the keffiyeh being worn by a Japanese punk band and their followers:

This spring, Jun Takahashi’s many fans in Tokyo and beyond will also be sporting the keffiyeh, albeit a subtler twisty version in gray and white that the cult designer created for his brand Undercover. Perhaps ironically, Takahashi, with the cultural distance to fashion that so many Japanese enjoy, captures the essence of the spirit of the keffiyeh better than most in his multi-ethnic, self-assured, punk universe.

Few examples show the universality of the keffiyeh more aptly: from traditional Arab headdress to raiment for Japanese punk rockers.

In New York City’s alternative paper, The Village Voice, we see in-depth analysis of the keffiyeh trend by fashion critic Nina Lalli (2005). Titled ‘Checkered past’, the article follows the western tendency of including Arafat’s role in the emergence of the popularity of the keffiyeh as fashion. However, as in virtually all articles written in the West on this subject, there is no mention of the Israeli occupation or the keffiyeh being worn by Palestinians within the framework of social solidarity. The exclusion of culturally relevant information regarding the keffiyeh’s symbolism for solidarity would be more understandable if the writers would not include such a focus on Yasser Arafat, an individual who has been thoroughly villainized by the western press.

In her description of the keffiyeh-wearing trend, Lalli provides the following observations:

Most non-Arab New Yorkers wear them in one of three ways. Pro-Palestinian activists usually drape them loosely over their shoulders, as was recently seen at anti-war protests. World-music types bunch them to make a regular, long scarf, as girls did in the ’80s. And the hippest kids fold the square in half to make a triangle and gather it around the neck, center point-down over their chests.

Here we see that while Arabs are immediately excluded from the discourse, the last group earns the adulation of being ‘the hippest’; they are wearing the keffiyeh strictly for fashion reasons.

An article entitled ‘Where some see fashion, others see politics’ by New York Times fashion critic Kibum Kim (2007), begins with a description of a woman heading to a party outfitted in a keffiyeh who states that, ‘I knew … it’d be easily identifiable as a hip accessory’. She continues, ‘It’s hipster 101: I need my skinny jeans, some sort of scarf and a beat up T-shirt. O.K., I’m a hipster now.’

In all of the above examples, we see the fracturing of culture. The associated eradication of politics immanent in describing the keffiyeh as ‘some sort of scarf’ whose only purpose is to make one appear ‘hip’ manifests a litany of consequences for the formulation of western policies toward subaltern groups. In his The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Jacques Rancière contends that:

The real must be fictionalized in order to be thought. This proposition should be distinguished from any discourse – positive or negative – according to which everything is ‘narrative’, with alternations between ‘grand’ narratives and ‘minor’ narratives. The notion of ‘narrative’ locks us into oppositions between the real and artifice where both the positivists and the deconstructionists are lost. (2004: 38)

It is precisely the unbolting of that ‘narrative lock’ that analyzing the keffiyeh as a cultural guide can accomplish. Both political and cultural, both utilitarian and fashionable, the keffiyeh is a monument to the trans-aesthetic. Such profound indifference to a key cultural totem can only either lead to, or be correlated with, political apathy, which allows for precisely the sort of solipsistic foreign policy-making establishment that the West has found itself ensnared in today. A decade has passed since most of the young twenty-somethings were interviewed here, and this design allows us to read the keffiyeh (and the culture in which it operates) as it has traveled. Such breathing space allows us to temporalize and geographize this cultural accoutrement as the interviewees now presumably have positions of responsibility, families of their own, and so on, and have made their apathy a political problem for, inter alia, the Palestinian people.

The New York Times writer further notes: ‘Its newest wearers, who wrap it around the neck like a scarf, say they are less Fatah sympathizers than fashion party crashers. The keffiyeh appears to be … a symbol denuded of any potent political associations by pop culture’ (Kim, 2007; italics added). The manner in which the keffiyeh is worn becomes politically important, as the hipster wears it like a scarf, a protester wraps it around the face, or a savvy pro-Palestinian politician wears it on top of the head secured with a black agal (head rope), like Yasser Arafat (Shirazi-Mahajan, 1993: 57). When it comes to the western consumers’ assimilation of the keffiyeh, political awareness has been lost in favor of fashion. The cultural building blocks constructed by these Gen-Xers grew to manifest a political climate where ‘alternative facts’ become routine, and where the political dissipates into the aesthetic ether of consumerist anesthetic. These are the logical conclusive coordinates of a populace and culture whose acceptance of, or inability to even detect, ‘alternative facts’ (i.e. lies) is to be expected. After all, in 2004, a presidential administration that was already known to be contemptuous of the ‘reality based community’ (i.e. those who ‘believe that solutions emerge from judicious study of discernible reality’) was rewarded with re-election (Suskind, 2004). The strategy that won then has now, after an anomalous eight-year divergence, come to fruition. This idea, enunciated at the time by Bush administration insiders, is that real-reality is created ad hoc:

when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do. (Suskind, 2004)

With cultural fracture, the keffiyeh’s reality shifts based on an individual’s personal preference, so does reality itself. Facts, like the keffiyeh’s symbolism, become whatever you want them to be.

A further example of the politically unaware westerner is Kim’s following description of another fashionable young woman in New York City: ‘Clearly, many wearers have not considered the keffiyeh’s political import. “I’m not too up to speed in what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s an aesthetic thing”’ (interviewee in Kim, 2007).

Kim goes on to discuss the popularity of the keffiyeh in Britain, and how there too the political becomes subservient to the trendy:

TopShop, the high-street juggernaut, is selling keffiyehs stamped with skull prints, conflating two hot looks of the recent past. Dr. Swedenburg said he thinks that the exotic element of the scarf becomes more important and the political aspect less so, as it becomes mainstream. ‘It’s chic because it’s different. It’s Eastern.’

As commodification giveth (corporate profits and hip fashion); commodification taketh (political erasure and liquefied solidarity). It is therefore worthwhile to explore the way many westerners will buy their keffiyehs. We can begin by examining that all-encompassing warehouse of goods, eBay. A search for keffiyeh yields several results, with virtually every option for purchasing it framed in militaristic terms. Emblematic is one advertised as the jumbled ‘Scarf Keffiyeh Shemagh Arab Original Authentic Quality Palestine Yemen Tactical’. The use of ‘Tactical’ is crucial, as the consumer cannot escape the jingoistic nexus of the ‘Arab’ and the keffiyeh. Furthermore, on the same site, the customer will find keffiyehs advertised as ‘Official SAS Military Shemagh Keffiyeh in Desert Cammo’. It should be noted that SAS is the abbreviation for Special Air Service, a special forces component of the British military, known for extreme use of violence throughout the Middle East and Africa (Gordon, 1987; James, 2001). In these cases the keffiyeh – which gained widespread popularity in the Arab world as an important symbol for solidarity against British colonization – has been commodified for, and by, those who imagine themselves to be that very oppressor. This image has been popularized by the likes of Matt Damon and Ralph Fiennes in movies such as The Green Zone (2010) and the Oscar winning The Hurt Locker (2008), respectively. In a non-imaginary way, the keffiyeh actually is being worn today by western military forces conducting operations throughout the Arab world. With violent swagger, the white, western male wraps himself in the keffiyeh while he puts the Other in his place. The broader cultural correlation of this is the extirpation of social justice and the tearing apart of solidarity.

Conclusion

‘Trump presidency already altering Israeli-Palestinian politics’

(New York Times headline, 22 January (Fisher, 2017)

On the new immediacy of social justice with respect to Palestine, Rashid Khalidi (2017) writes:

Whereas America’s solicitous concern for Israel and its disregard for the Palestinians were once cloaked behind evenhandedness, under Trump we are set to see a more complete convergence between America’s political leadership and the most chauvinistic, religious, and right-wing government in Israel’s history. It will be this Israeli government and its new American soul mates who will call the tune in Palestine for at least the next several years.

Beyond analyzing the politico-cultural power of the keffiyeh per se, we have used it to explain how we got to this political moment. Social interactionism shows us how the keffiyeh works as a particular cultural artifact of great political and aesthetic power. Affect theory enables us to understand the broader implications of what this means for politics and culture internationally. We placed the keffiyeh in the current, the ideological, and the cultural in order to unpack at least some of the global fracturing now under way. From the rise of the Reagan–Thatcher project of hegemonic neoliberalism to the triumph of Trumpism, the keffiyeh serves as a cultural lodestar. The keffiyeh is culture; as such it allows us to view a subject of extraordinary complexity in a digestible way. Its uses and abuses discussed here elucidate global trends occurring presently. We have traveled with the keffiyeh across time and geography to show that as perceptions of it have changed, so has the culture in and through which it operates. Its political uses, in many, but not all ways, have been subordinated to the functions of financialization, de-politicization and the resultant culture that has sublimated itself in pursuit of the same. Already executive orders have been issued by the new US president that, overnight, stopped most Arabs in greatest need from seeking refuge within the borders of the US, and this is only the beginning of a new politics of anti-solidarity. In this way, the politicization, de-politicization and commodification of the keffiyeh is a stand-in for how the mechanics of culture operate today. All of this serves to remind us of Adorno’s cri de coeur, ‘stupidity is not a natural quality, but one socially produced and reinforced’ (2005 [1954]: 105). As regimes of dehumanizing politics gain dominance, we can look to the keffiyeh as an emblem, a reminder, of what solidarity might look like ‘here and everywhere’ (Said, 2003: np).