The Museum between Industry and Colonialism- Banksy Museum as a case رسالة ماجستير

Abstract

This thesis is established as a research attempt from inside the Palestinian museum model growing under Israeli colonialism; this museum preserves the structure of national identity and Palestinian memory and may constitute an important part of them. Therefore, in light of this significance, an attempt was made here to understand and analyze the museum by understanding the role of Israeli colonialism, the Palestinian Authority and the cultural industry in the museum. These three sides are examined through the location, holdings of the museum, the mechanism of its work, and its interaction with the environment and the audience, whether in Palestine or abroad. This attempt to dismantle the role of colonialism, authority and the cultural industry comes in order to try to measure the extent to which Palestinian national identity and memory are affected by examining every act or move that is presented in the museum, especially in light of the three dialectical sides intertwining, while highlighting that the existing Israeli colonialism has the greatest influence. This attempt also tracks and analyzes the holdings and location of the Banksy Museum, the case study in this research, which is located inside a hotel in Bethlehem along with other Palestinian museums such as the Palestinian Museum, Yasser Arafat Museum, Bank of Palestine Museum, Mahmoud Darwish Museum, Palestinian Communist Museum, and others. The research included ten museums that were used to prove or negate some of the hypotheses of this research. The research focused on presenting the history of museums in Palestine, the period they were established in, their locations, and their historical sequence. All of these Palestinian museums are not separated from the emergence of the international museums' system, its dialectic and the developments that have affected it. This is in order to understand the developments that coincided with the various historical periods and the impact of each of these stages, whether VI pre-modern, modern or post-modern, on the building of the museum in general and in Palestine in particular. The research also analyzed the overlap between national identity, memory and the museum in its global context. All of this comes as a basis for understanding the museum system in Palestine and for understanding the type of culture that Palestinian museums mirror, the source of their presentation, the display of symbols of value and impact on memory and national identity and the way to portray these symbols in whole or in part, in addition to the type of discourse that predominates in them to know the impact they leave on the Palestinian national memory and identity.