Full Description
As the first cultural history of Palestinian aviation, Palestine in the Air reveals civil aviation's role in the 'question of Palestine' over the past century.
How do Palestinians—as individuals, communities, and as a nascent state—engage with the air? How does their systemic exclusion from aerial agency inform dominant and counter-narratives of culture and modernity?
International civil aviation is a powerful tool for the disenfranchisement of Palestinian statehood, connectivity, and mobility. Yet, Palestinians have constantly sought to harness aviation as a legitimate component of modern state-building. They have also creatively appropriated aviation technologies including balloons, kites, and drones as instruments of resistance, exploiting flight's symbolic qualities of escape and liberation to highlight the injustices of occupation.
Using an interdisciplinary approach that draws on media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, diplomacy, and history, Palestine in the Air examines civil aviation's political, social, and cultural impact upon the Palestinian quest for sovereignty. The book makes use of an unprecedented range of aviation-related sources spanning unpublished memoirs, print and image archives, interviews, art, film, literature, poetry, and stand-up comedy.
Contents
Introduction
Histories of Flight
Colonial and National
Aviation Diplomacy and Critical Air Studies
Literature Review
Methodology and Chapter Summaries
1 Air, Space, and Society
How Air Expanded Space
The First Air Statesmen
Imperial Projections
Civilian Air Travel
Village Files
2 Chosen Instrument
Politics in the Air
Palestine Airways and Aviron
Eastern Airways and the Arab Airways Association
Gumbley and the Chosen Instrument
3 Capital Flight
Middle East Aviation in the 1950s
Jerusalem-Amman Relations
Kendall Town Plan and Point Four
Aviation in Israel, 1948-67
Arrested Motion
4 Perforating Worlds
A Crisis of Representation
The Skyjackings
Air-to-Ground Communication
A Crack in Time
Diplomatic Payoffs
5 Chairman of the Air
New York and Havana
Visual Approach
Windfall from America
Onboarding the Media
The Libyan Crash
Homecoming
6 An Airport, a Flag, an Airplane
Aligning Revolutions
New Winds in Oslo
Missed Approaches
Terminal Ambition
7 Flying While Palestinian
Mobile Typologies
Getting to the Airport
Turning Points
Airport Refugees and Wheel-Well Stowaways
8 Reterritorializing
Time-Space Dislocation
Remixing Realities
Lines of Flight
Airborne Incursions
Epilogue
