Palestine in the Sky: Settler Security States through the Astro-Futuristic Fantasies of Larissa Sansour

• In Event: Political Imaginings of Palestine Beyond the Here and Now

Abstract

Bringing together insights on the territorial and ethical dimensions of the Palestinian conflict with queer, feminist, and diasporic utopian criticism, this paper questions what outer space and astrofuturisms might yield for thinking Palestinian sovereignty otherwise. Employing Palestinian visual artist Larissa Sansour’s science fiction fantasy work as a form of knowledge and critique, this paper asks after Palestine’s other worlds—past, present, future, and in the sky. Specifically, I explore what it means to conjure “up” the future of the Palestinian people. How might we imagine a vertical solution to the problem of Palestinian sovereignty? In Sansour’s science fiction short film and photo series titled Nation Estate (2012), we glean a fantasy break from the impasse of colonial occupation and related miseries produced by the state of permanent war. The artist dreams up a world where the Palestinian people have created their own state in a single skyscraper: “the Nation Estate.” “One colossal high-rise houses the entire Palestinian population - now finally living the high life. Each city has its own floor: Jerusalem on the 13th floor, Ramallah on the 14th, Sansour's native Bethlehem on the 21st and so on. Intercity trips previously marred by checkpoints are now made by elevator. “

To rethink the geometry of occupation and settler security state violence in this way conjures the influential work of Eyal Weizman (2002, 2006), whose insights into “the politics of verticality” offers a critical language to analyze the architectural dimensions of the ongoing Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands, water, sewage and airspace. Unlike Weizman’s diagnosis of the dominant logic of settler security state violence, the artist approaches these concerns differently—a mix of escapology (Brooks 2005) and concrete utopian thinking that not only allows us to “imagine otherwise” (Chuh 2003) but to “imagine up.” In short, Sansour’s film reads architecture and technology as viable tools for decolonization and the vexed project of state sovereignty for the dispossessed.

Sansour’s artwork echoes the roots of “astrofuturism” in the US, which developed amidst mid-century Cold War commitments to the space race, when outer space represented, on the one hand, speculation about colonial explorations and the presumed imperial ends of US technological and political power, and on the other, liberal and utopian ideals for solutions to the conflicts and perils of modern American life (Kilgore 2003). Her work further speaks to contemporary logics of war and terror in which aerospace represents the “final frontier” for US and Israeli counterinsurgency operations (McCoy 2012). Using the lens of “adversarial internationalizations” (Said 1990), this paper tracks joint settler security state logics between the US and Israel, with Palestine as the “archetypal laboratory” for the development and articulation of new technologies of global counterinsurgencies (Lubin 2013). Through the fantasy works of Sansour we begin to glean a vision for outer space that might serve as the template and testing ground for utopian imaginings beyond the here and now of settler security state violence. In so doing, this paper not only attempts to contribute to the transnationalization of the American Studies project, but probe its outerplanetary and cosmic dimensions too.

Author

• Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL)