ABSTRACT

This paper examines the ways in which Palestinian children variously perform and transform the discourse of trauma and the aesthetic of suffering that have come to dominate representations of Palestinian childhood and the Palestinian struggle in general. It is argued that everyday beauty in the lives of Palestinian refugee children, as found in mundane spaces and enacted through interpersonal relationships, constitutes an aesthetic disruption to the dominant representation of trauma as put forward by international humanitarian aid organisations and development agencies. Far from being restricted to the immediacy of everyday spaces and interactions, however, everyday beauty is located within wider national and religious geographical imaginaries, and likewise forms the basis of critiques of social and political injustice, and demands for a more just and equitable future. It is argued that children enact an everyday Islamic ethic of beauty as part of a wider political demand for life itself.