Political Imaginings of Palestine Beyond the Here and Now

Session Submission Type: Paper Session: Traditional Format

Abstract

This panel advances a series of imaginative, utopian, queer, and non-linear modes of thinking about Palestinian sovereignty struggles amidst entangled regimes of U.S and Israeli settler security. Drawing from work in queer studies on futurity and scholarship in post/colonial and American studies on settler security violence, the panelists underscore alternative, speculative, and literal maps of a future without occupation in Palestine. Ronak K. Kapadia focuses on Palestinian visual artist Larissa Sansour’s short film and photo series Nation Estate (2012) wherein Palestine is its own single skyscraper with Jerusalem on its 13th floor, Ramallah on the 14th, and Bethlehem on the 21st. Bypassing the impossibilities of movement that inhere in checkpoints, Nation Estate imagines an architectural future without occupation. Kapadia asks what it means to conjure “up” the future of Palestine and what analytical and political purchase we gain by taking a fantasy break from the impasse of colonial occupation. Similarly detailing the work of envisioning a post-occupation Palestine, Jennifer Kelly explores not science fiction, but the collaboration of Palestinian and Israeli activists blueprinting a Palestine/Israel after the realization of the Palestinian Right of Return. She specifically highlights the collaborative work of tourism, city planning, and architectural imagining between the Palestinian organization Badil Resource Center for Palestinian Residency and Refugee Rights and the Israeli NGO Zochrot to imagine a future shared space after a history of settler-colonial occupation. Lisa Bhungalia highlights the work of a younger generation of Palestinian activists, artists, and grassroots organizers who are creating new possibilities through transformative acts that confront and transcend the colonial realities that structure their lives. She examines the Dalia Foundation, a Palestinian philanthropic organization that works to reconstitute local networks fragmented by dispossession, and Decolonizing Architecture, an architectural collective based in Beit Sahour that uses art and architecture to envision "the morning after revolution." Lastly, Sophia Azeb reads The X-Men comics as an imperfect allegory of Zionism and the struggle for Palestinian liberation, exploring the rhetoric of neo-liberalism and attachment to the nation-state in Professor X’s anti-Zionist and Magneto’s super-Zionist battles. She raises questions about U.S political entrenchment in the Israel/Palestine conflict by charting the ways in which the X-men – as stand-ins for U.S citizens – fail to acknowledge their own complicity in Magneto’s campaign. Together, this panel questions what happens when the language of occupation and colonialism is turned on itself: instead of bypass roads, artists and activists are imagining a future where the logics of checkpoints are bypassed; instead of the violence of architecture in the service of occupation, organizers are positioning architecture as a viable tool for decolonization. In their wide-ranging accounts of activism and expressive culture, the panelists contest the hollow rhetoric of U.S. neutrality, which obscures the imbrication of U.S. and Israeli settler security regimes. Focusing on insurgent alternatives to the intensifying logics of occupation and dispossession, the panel further provides, in the words of Fred Moten, a moment of “refreshment”—a way to re-activate our political imaginings of Palestine beyond the here and now.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Keith Feldman, University of California, Berkeley (CA)

Individual Presentations

• Palestine in the Sky: Settler Security States through the Astro-Futuristic Fantasies of Larissa Sansour - Ronak K. Kapadia, University of Illinois, Chicago (IL)

• Blueprinting Post-Return: Tourism, Pedagogy, and the Work of Imagination in Palestine - Jennifer Kelly, University of Texas, Austin (TX)

• Towards the Morning After Revolution: Architecture, Aid, and the Possible in Palestine - Lisa Bhungalia, Syracuse University (NY)

• Comic Colonialism: X-Men and the Superhero Perils of Zionism - Sophia Azeb, University of Southern California (CA)

Comment

• Keith Feldman, University of California, Berkeley (CA)