ABSTRACT
In the 1960s, the immediate connection between embroidered dresses and Palestinian national identity was not a given. On the one hand, embroidered dresses were being subsumed under ethnographic collections—such as that of the British Museum—to document a rapidly disappearing culture. On the other hand, a budding Israeli nation was laying claim to these dresses as part of its own historical narrative. Yet, by the 1980s, an increasingly assertive Palestinian nationalism had established embroidered dresses as iconic of Palestinian identity. This chapter argues that Palestinian organizations in exile revitalized and spread the interest in embroidery through different conceptions of labor: as part of charity efforts aimed at giving women in refugee camps work and a measure of economic independence, and as part of the Palestinian Liberation Organization's (PLO) project for forming a Palestinian working class. Together, the various embroidery initiatives engaged a wide cross-section of the Palestinian community: upper-class urban women, destitute refugees, and middle-class revolutionaries and activists. Through the involvement of these disparate constituents of Palestinian society in Lebanon, embroidery became not just an expression of Palestinian nationalism, it was also one of the places where a nation in exile was, so to speak, woven together.
