Representations of Palestinian Culture in the Digital Public Sphere: A Semiotic Analysis of the Thobe and the Keffiyeh

Abstract

Palestinian cultural identity has always been the flip side of the Palestinian people’s political resistance. While many studies have examined Palestinian culture from political and historical perspectives, limited academic works have investigated how social media plays a role in providing opportunities for Palestinians to resist negative stereotypes and provide alternative representations of their cultural symbols, including traditional customs. In its attempt to fill a gap in the existing body of knowledge, this article examines the contemporary representation of Palestinian culture, in particular, national garments—the thobe and keffiyeh —in the digital public sphere. Through employing theories of representation, the digital public sphere and applying semiotic analysis, this article follows four main X (formerly known as Twitter) hashtag-based trends that highlight traditional Palestinian garments (thobe and keffiyeh): #MyHistoricalThobe, #TweetYourThobe, #WorldKeffiyehDay, and #KeffiyehDay. Forty tweets extracted from top 10 X accounts, which first appeared in a hashtag search and were tweeted using these hashtags, were selected and coded. Using a semiotic analysis, the article deconstructed the tweets into connotation and denotation elements to better understand what the thobe and the keffiyeh mean collectively in the context of Palestinian cultural narrative. This research contributes to the debate concerning the relationship between interactive digital platforms and contemporary cultural resistance. It pushes forth the argument that shared representations of national cultural symbols are noticed when examining, and collectively reading, particular social media-based campaigns.