Cinematic Activism: Palestinian Cultural Politics at the Boston Palestine Film Festival

• In Event: From Furious Orientals to Funny Arabs: The Politics and Possibilities of Arab American Media Studies

Abstract

This paper examines how and why Palestinian cinema—through films and film festivals—has emerged as a site around which Palestinians in the US organize their social justice activism and assert their diasporic identification with Palestine. Since the birth of the Palestinian cinematic movement in the 1980s, narrative film has become a powerful site for the contestation and affirmation of Palestinian national identity. In turn, the production of Palestine Film Festivals in diaspora serves to affirm transnational Palestinian communities while also complicating the scholarly conceptions of Palestinian national identity. Boston, Massachusetts serves as a particularly useful site study not only because it is home to one of the earliest and largest Arab American populations in the United States, but also because it plays hosts to one of the most successful Palestine Film Festivals in the US. As a participatory format, Film festivals are widely accepted as both pleasurable and educational, making them well suited to social justice activism and community organizing. This paper explores the ways in which Boston-area Palestinian-American community organizes itself around the Boston Palestine Film Festival as both a process of national identification and a strategy towards a socially just representational praxis, or what I theorize as “cinematic activism.” Through a combination of ethnographic research and media analysis, this dissertation takes the controversy around—and successes of—Palestinian film screenings in the Boston area as a site through which to understand the identitarian, pedagogical, and political work of Palestinian cinema in the United States.

Author

• Umayyah Cable, University of Southern California (CA)