Full Description
In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.
Contents
Preface vii
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction. Archival Imagination of/for the Future 1
1. Revisiting the Orientalist Archive: Jumana Manna's Re-Mapped Musical Archive of Palestine 37
2. Lost and Found in Israeli Footage: Kamal Aljafari's "Jaffa Trilogy" and the Productive Violation of the Colonial Visual Archive 53
3. "Suspended between Past and Future": Larissa Sansour's Sci-Fi Archaeological Archive in the Past-Future Tense 72
4. "Face to Face with the Ancestors of Civilization": Ruanna Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas's Archive of the Copy 87
5. Gesturing toward Resistance: Farah Saleh's Archive of Gestures 107
Afterword 128
Notes 135
Bibliography 171
Index 189
