Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible

Abstract

This essay explores how contemporary Palestinian cultural producers—across literature, art, and film—simultaneously expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of settler occupation. It pairs Adania Shibli's 2002 novella Masās (Touch) with the 2013 short film Condom Lead directed by Tarzan and Arab in order to theorize a poetics of the everyday. Their works generate an ontology of the present eschatologically bound to an emptied future time–space. The essay then turns to Khalil Rabah's conceptual multisite project the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003) and Larissa Sansour's science fiction trilogy: A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015). Their projects engage in speculative modes of world-building that bridge past and future temporalities in order to render legible the unviability of the present. I situate these works, on the one hand, in relation to scholarship on affect and ṣumūd (steadfastness) in post-Oslo popular Palestinian cultural production. On the other, I put them into conversation with theorizations of counter-futurism and Afrofuturism as historical recovery projects. Read paratactically, this body of Palestinian art illustrates the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.

Keywords:

• Afrofuturism
• art
• Palestine
• science fiction
• speculative fiction

Notes

1 The same press also published Iraq + 100: Stories from Another Iraq, which asks Iraqi writers to imagine 2103 – a century after the US invasion (Blasim 2016).

2 For an overview of scholarship critical of affect-laden modes of representation, see Laïda-Hanieh (2014, 48). On post-Oslo martyr commemoration, see Allen (2006).

3 This includes works by Tanya Habjouqa, Mona Hatoum, Khaled Jarrar, and Yazid Annani.

4 Popularized in the OPT and refugee camps, ṣumūd can refer to having a firm connection to Palestinian culture and identity in the diaspora (Khalili 2007, 101; Rijke and Van Teeffelen 2014, 87–91). It has also been described as a “third way” between the binary of armed resistance and hopeless resignation (Shehadeh 1982). On the shifting inflection of ṣumūd, see Pearlman (2014, 96); Ryan (2015, 305).

5 Tarzan and Arab also did a series of posters titled Gazawood that rebranded Israeli military operations against Gaza as Hollywood blockbuster movie posters: https://www.palestineposterproject.org/special-collection/gazawood-series.

6 The intensity of the offensive, particularly the use of white phosphorus munitions in urban areas, garnered significant international criticism (Human Rights Watch 2009).

7 Anxieties around discrepant birthrates have fueled various state initiatives in which reproduction among Jewish families is framed “as a patriotic duty in the country’s existential struggle” (Eisenbud 2018).

8 Alongside the museum, Rabah created an airline named the United States of Palestine Airlines or USPA and a branding agency called the Palestinian Design Force, named after the Israeli Defense Forces (Rabah 2006).

9 The project presciently foreshadows some of the tensions surrounding the Palestinian Museum in Bizreit, which controversially opened on 18 May 2016 without a single art object in it (Toukan 2018).

10 The work of Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker Jumana Manna similarly explores the politics of archeology in Palestinian and Israeli national history.

11 While it is beyond the scope of this essay to explore this linkage, the nascent body of critical and artistic works dubbed “Arab futurism” or “Gulf futurism” are frequently in dialogue with Afrofuturism (Nazif 2018; Parikka 2018; L. Suleiman 2016).