The urgency of producing Palestine

Extract

Palestine has long been in the global conscience, especially for many, a beacon of a decolonial struggle for liberation. Today, there is a new urgency to understand Palestine, more so with the younger generations in the West who face the force of sanctioned ignorance around the geopolitical history of the region. Producing Palestine edited by Dina Matar and Helga Tawil Souri, comes at an opportune time to address this, and it is indeed a gift of compassionate, painstaking, and rigorous scholarship of deep conscience. Media is at the heart of the book; not surprisingly, in today’s world, everything emerges through media. Each case, as the chapters are called, offers a humanistic optic into the unflagging Palestinian spirit against European settler colonialism. The authors bring to life words, films, websites, digital archives, critical cartography, mapping apps, posters, graffiti, tweets, other social media content, photographs, food, and recipes as multimodal forms of analysis that are critical to “the reconfigurations of (political) power” (7) to reimagine Palestine. Thus, media is not a mere commodity but “an expansion of what Palestine is” (6). It becomes a process of reclamation of Palestinian psychic and spatial sovereignty. Media, thus, is a territory, another battlefront where Palestinians fight. A purposeful and creative imaginary is the only way to the reality of Palestine and its dream. In what follows, I address the cases in the book by diving them into broad recurrent analytic themes including Production, Return, Subversion, Digital Capture, and Objects, to explore what they have come to mean for the authors in envisioning liberation of Palestine and the universal emancipatory potential it carries.