|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
ToC: Journal of Palestine Studies 44.4 (2015)
Reply
Tag Archives: Elia Suleiman
New Book: Hochberg, Visual Occupations
Hochberg, Gil Z. Visual Occupations: Violence and Visibility in a Conflict Zone, Perverse Modernities. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2015.
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists’ creation of new ways of seeing—such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists’ exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness —offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel’s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone 1
Part I. Concealment
1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting 37
2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship 57
Part II. Surveillance
3. The (Soldier’s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone 79
4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress 97
Part III. Witnessing
5. “Nothing to Look At”; or, “For Whom Are You Shooting?”: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze 115
6. Shooting War: On Witnessing One’s Failure to See (on Time) 139
Closing Words 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 187
Index 207
New Book: Morag, Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema
Morag, Raya. Waltzing with Bashir: Perpetrator Trauma and Cinema. London: Tauris, 2013.
Waltzing with Bashir proposes a new paradigm for cinema trauma studies – the trauma of the perpetrator. Recognizing a current shift in interest from the trauma suffered by victims to that suffered by perpetrators, the book seeks to theorize this still under-studied field thus breaking the repression of this concept and phenomenon in psychoanalysis and in cinema literature. Taking as a point of departure the distinction between testimony given by the victim and confession made by the perpetrator, this pioneering work ventures to define and analyze perpetrator trauma in scholarly, representational, literary, and societal contexts. In contrast to the twentieth-century definition of the perpetrator based on modern wars and totalitarian regimes,Morag defines the perpetrator in the context of the twenty-first century’s new wars and democratic regimes. The direct result of a drastic transformation in the very nature of war, made manifest by the lethal clash between soldier and civilian in a battlefield newly defined in bodily terms, the new trauma paradigm stages the trauma of the soldier turned perpetrator, thus offering a novel perspective on issues of responsibility and guilt.
Such theoretical insights demonstrate that the epistemology of the post-witness era requires breaking deep-seated psychological and psychiatric, as well as cultural and political, repression. Driven by the emergence of a new wave of Israeli documentary cinema, Waltzing with Bashir analyzes the Israeli film and literature produced in the aftermath of the second Intifada. As Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir and other new wave films demonstrate, Israeli cinema, attached on one side to the legacy of the Holocaust and on the other to the Israeli Occupation, is a highly relevant case for probing the limits of both victim and perpetrator traumas, and for revisiting and recontextualizing the crucial moment in which the victim/perpetrator cultural symbiosis is dismantled.
Raya Morag is an Associate Professor of Cinema Studies at the Department of Communication and Journalism, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
Table of Contents
Introduction
From Victim to Perpetrator Trauma
Part I: Victim Trauma
1. The Body as the Battlefield
2. Chronic Victim Trauma and Terror
3. Queerness, Ethnicity, and Terror
Part II: Perpetrator Trauma
4. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Male Perpetrator
5. The New Wave of Documentary Cinema: The Female Perpetrator
6. The New Wave of Documentary Literature
Conclusion
The Perpetrator Complex
New Publication: Matar and Harb, Narrating Conflict in the Middle East
Dina Matar (author), Zahera Harb (author), eds. Narrating Conflict in the Middle East: Discourse, Image and Communications Practices in Lebanon and Palestine. London: Tauris, 2013.
The term conflict has often been used broadly and uncritically to talk
about diverse situations ranging from street protests to war, though the
many factors that give rise to any conflict and its continuation over a
period of time vary greatly. The starting point of this innovative book
is that it is unsatisfactory either to consider conflict within a
singular concept or alternatively to consider each conflict as entirely
distinct and unique; Narrating Conflict in the Middle East explores
another path to addressing long-term conflict. The contributors set out
to examine the ways in which such conflicts in Palestine and Lebanon
have been and are narrated, imagined and remembered in diverse spaces,
including that of the media. They examine discourses and representations
of the conflicts as well as practices of memory and performance in
narratives of suffering and conflict, all of which suggest an embodied
investment in narrating or communicating conflict. In so doing, they
engage with local, global, and regional realities in Lebanon and in
Palestine and they respond dynamically to these realities.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Approaches to Narrating Conflict in Palestine and Lebanon: Practices, Discourses and Memories Dina Matar and Zahera Harb
Practices
Just a Few Small Changes: The Limits of Televisual Palestinian Representation of Conflicts within the Transnational ‘Censorscape’ Matt Sienkiewicz
Mediating Internal Conflict in Lebanon and its Ethical Boundaries Zahera Harb
Negotiating Representation, Re-making War: Transnationalism, Counter-hegemony and Contemporary Art from Post-Taif Beirut Hanan Toukan
Narratives in Conflict: Emile Habibi’s al-Waqa’i al-Ghariba and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention Refqa Abu-Remaileh
Discourses
Islam in the Narrative of Fatah and Hamas Atef Alshaer
Al Manar: Cultural Discourse and Representation of Resistance Rounwah Adly Riyadh Bseiso
The Battle over Victimhood: Roles and Implications of Narratives of Suffering in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict Kirkland Newman Smulders
The ‘I Love…’ Phenomenon in Lebanon: The Transmutations of Discourse, its Impact on Civil Society, the Media and Democratization Carole Helou
Memories and Narration
Making Sense of War News among Adolescents in Lebanon: The Politics of Solidarity and Partisanship Helena Nassif
Narrating the Nakba: Palestinian Filmmakers Revisit 1948 Nadia Yaqub
Bearing Witness to Al Nakba in a Time of Denial Teodora Todorova
USE discount code for special offer on paperback: BOUNDARIES
Online Israel Studies Bulletin Board 