A Ball

Critical Exchanges in Postcolonial Studies, Post-9/11.

September 11, 2001 generated diverse responses from around the world, but for many subjects located in ‘‘the West,’’ an enduring perception surfaced in the aftermath of the attacks: that 9=11 revealed the fragility of the ‘‘Western Self’’ as a secure identity. Postcolonial critics have long been sensitive to the precarious nature of self-identification and its mutual dependency on the construction of an Other (Hall 1992; Said 1997). But as bystanders in New York and those who witnessed the attacks’ traumatic rupture in the world’s ‘‘safe zones’’ and ‘‘wild zones’’ for themselves (Urry 2002, 63–64) did not require a critical vocabulary to understand that they had experienced the encroachment of ‘‘radical alterity’’— Otherness beyond the bounds of the imaginable (Lacan 1988)—into the locality of their ‘‘world.’’ This awareness of the Other was reflected in that most binarized of refrains, ‘‘why do they hate us?’’ voiced by George W. Bush and echoed by others in the immediate aftermath of the attacks (Bush 2001b). But following the initial stages of shock in the enduring trauma posed by 9=11, more sophisticated formulations of that question have been posed in scholarly and public debate—questions interrogating who ‘‘they’’ are, who ‘‘we’’ are, and how each might be formulated in relation to the other (see Roy 2001; Hershberg and Moore 2002). In these profoundly uncertain times for cultural identification, systems of analysis familiar with the (de)construction of selfhood, alterity and representation seem necessary, and it is here that postcolonial studies might prove useful. In this move towards self-scrutiny post-9=11, it is not only the presence of the Other that has moved into sight; many topics of the so-called margin—race, gender, ethnicity, religion—have been

Kafka at the West Bank checkpoint: de-normalizing the Palestinian encounter before the law

The checkpoint has emerged as a quintessential trope within the contemporary Palestinian imagination, to such an extent that “checkpoint narratives” have arguably come to assume a dangerously “normalized” status as everyday, even iconic features of Palestinian existence. Turning to the films Route 181 by Michel Khleifi and Eyal Sivan, and like twenty impossibles by Annemarie Jacir, this article explores how alternative representations (and theorizations) of checkpoint encounter might serve to “de-normalize” the checkpoint in a way that invites us to interrogate the very nature of the checkpoint apparatus in itself, including the nature of the “law” that it represents. Mobilizing the critical paradigms of the “state of exception” and “homo sacer” drawn from the theoretical work of Giorgio Agamben and the literary work of Franz Kafka, the article argues that apprehension of the enduring oddity and abnormality of the checkpoint serves as a vital mode of critical resistance to the policies of “spatio-cide”, “securitization” and colonialism exercised at the hands of the State of Israel through the checkpoint mechanism.

Impossible Intimacies: Towards a Visual Politics of “Touch” at the Israeli-Palestinian Border

Abstract The West Bank Wall (or ‘Separation Fence’) constructed by Israel along much of its border with the occupied West Bank offers a potent visual signifier of the divisive, restrictive and intrusive ways in which the Israeli occupation touches the everyday lives of Palestinians. Consequently, the Wall has become a prominent site of representational concern in Arab visual culture. This article examines two particular visual representations of the Israeli-Palestinian border, Mona Hatoum’s sculpture ‘Grater Divide’ and Simone Bitton’s film Wall, in order to explore the complex politics of encounter and representation that circulate around the border in these works. In doing so, it seeks to establish a broader understanding of the ways in which discursive and cultural boundaries might be negotiated and crossed in the service of an interdisciplinary model of Arab cultural studies.

Communing with Darwish's ghosts: absent presence in dialogue with the Palestinian moving image

In his prose poem Absent Presence (published in English translation in 2010), the revered Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish identified a source of tension that resonates through much Palestinian creative expression: a tension not between Arab and Jew, nor between Israeli and Palestinian but between presence and absence. Drawing on the many motifs of presence and absence, and by extension, of visibility and invisibility, spectrality and haunting that surface in Absent Presence, this article seeks to translate Darwish’s poetic meditations into a visual context by placing his work in dialogue with two pieces of Palestinian video art, Sharif Waked’s To Be Continued … (2009) and Wafaa Yasin’s The Imaginary Houses of Palestine (2010), which share Darwish’s preoccupation with ideas of the spectral, and of present-day Palestine’s complex relationship with its past. Mobilizing a range of critical concepts including Abu-Lughod’s theorizations of ‘postmemory’ and Derrida’s notion of ‘the spectral’, this article explores the ways in which various forms of absence arising from Palestine’s fraught national history haunt contemporary Palestinian video art, and argues that the presence of the ‘spectral’ within such works also reveals a vibrant creative present in motion.