Becoming Palestine : Toward an Archival Imagination of the Future

"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."-- Site de JSTOR "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 Ruanna 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"-- Provided by publisher Archival Imagination of/for the Future -- Revisiting the Orientalist Archive: Jumana Manna's Re-Mapped Musical Archive of Palestine -- Lost and Found in Israeli Footage: Kamal Aljafari's "Jaffa Trilogy" and the Productive Violation of the Colonial Visual Archive -- "Suspended between Past and Future": Larissa Sansour's Sci-Fi Archaeological Archive in the Past-Future Tense -- "Face to Face with the Ancestors of Civilization": Ruanne Abou-Rahme and Basel Abbas's Archive of the Copy -- Gesturing toward Resistance: Farah Saleh's Archive of Gestures