Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (New Texts Out Now)

Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (New Texts Out Now)

Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (New Texts Out Now)

By : Kaveh Askari

Kaveh Askari, Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran: Material Cultures in Transit (Oakland: University of California Press, 2022).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Kaveh Askari (KA): I was on a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley and was looking for a distraction from the focused work of writing up my first book. The Bancroft Library had physical copies of Iranian newspapers from the 1920s and ‘30s, which provided a break from microfilm and digital screens. Reading through the cinema ads and translated movie stories, I noticed the ways films were repurposed and revalued as they moved across borders. I was interested in the practical dimensions of this process—which films were shipped to the Middle East, how they got there, how they were reedited and projected—but also in the stories exhibitors and translators told about the films premiering in Tehran sometimes a decade after their initial release. I was a short drive from several Hollywood studio and distributor archives, so I started to compare distribution accounting records memos with the exhibition records of the same films in Iran. This was the seed of a cross-archival project, eventually involving multiple trips to Iran and studio archives in Texas and Wisconsin, in which I reconstructed parts of a network that was not meant to be transparent. This circuitous exchange network, enabling the long afterlives of cinema’s objects, seemed to be a missing piece in the cultural history of cinema in the region.

Relay evokes circulation but with an emphasis on sequence, interruption, and incremental agency over top-down or seamless transparency.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

KA: I structured this book around a conception of relay, which evokes both mediated communication and physical movement. In its modern form, relay comes to everyday usage from wired and wireless communication networks. A relay point extends the range of a signal that has become weak and amplifies it. Such a conception of relay can foreground the movement of media while also accounting for decentralized forms of agency in this movement. This decentered agency is especially evident in relay networks where little practical hope for top-down management of the network exists. 

In its second common usage, as a term of physical movement, relay refers to a race (archaically, to a hunt) that requires multiple animals (human or otherwise) who each hasten to a point of exchange. In athletics, the carriers of a baton in the first segments of a relay race cannot act upon, or sometimes even see, the actions of the latter segments. An object crosses a long distance through a sequence of individual races. Obstructions in the sequence are not failures of organization. They are defining features of a relay’s cooperative movement.

Relay thus highlights two dimensions of cinema’s movements that this history prioritizes. The first suggests amplification in sequence; it directs attention to the transformations that take place in networks. The second draws attention to objects in transit, to the potentially beneficial obfuscations and obstructions at each stage of a relay. Relay evokes circulation but with an emphasis on sequence, interruption, and incremental agency over top-down or seamless transparency.  

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

KA: My first book, Making Movies into Art (British Film Institute, 2014) was about early cinema in the United States. While Relaying Cinema in Midcentury Iran is not a book on early cinema, its methods are informed by my training in the field. Early cinema studies might seem like an odd place to look for insight into traditions that move from the 1920s to the 1960s, but methods need not belong to periods. In adapting some of them, I seek to challenge a potential bottleneck in the historiography of cinema in Iran (with resonances elsewhere) around familiar archives, national industries, and their groundbreaking films.

The field of early cinema studies has challenged, from its beginnings, a narrowed historiography around the classical film oligopoly, around a standardized formal system, and around a centripetal definition of cinema as a coherent medium. Early cinema scholars have emphasized the unevenness of cinema’s textual address over a stable image of the movie spectator and exhibitor control over hierarchies of circulation that would otherwise privilege production centers. They have valued traditions that might seem too early or too late and have succeeded at reading myths of origin as allegories rather than as truths or falsehoods. Faced with received ideas steeped in a cult of invention, they have sought out moments of media volatility or plurality not with the goal of not delimiting failures and crosscurrents but of exploring the ways these failures lay bare the fissures within traditions ordinarily understood as seamless or as heroic inventions. Wary of privileging films over cinema, of imagining the individual film as something separate from the often-contradictory forces that bring it into view, the field has helped frame cinematic prestige in structural rather than textual terms. 

Early cinema scholars, a community that overlaps significantly with that of archivists and curators, regularly confront questions of ethics and accuracy that arise when working within the realities of severely limited access to material. These questions proliferate if one’s primary focus is not Europe or North America. These kinds of challenges are familiar to media historians working on regions where the oligopoly encountered serious obstacles, where exhibitors dismantled hierarchies of distribution, where film texts often did not address a stable spectator, and where it remains difficult to avoid painful shortages, blockages, and imbalances of archival evidence. While the period of early cinema in Iran ended long before the postwar era, a reader familiar with these methodological interventions and research challenges will see similar strategies for widening historiography in each chapter of this book. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

KA: The book crosses national traditions and borrows methods from different academic communities. My hope is that its readership will follow this pattern and not be concentrated in a single field. The book supplements some of the exciting new work being done in Iranian media studies, and I think many of us are enjoying a moment in that field where one can explore a very targeted topic and low-traffic archival collections without feeling pressure to reinvent the wheel.

I import and develop different methods for each chapter of the book so that I can address varied topics including distribution networks, engineering labor, film music, transnational genre, and coproduction. Individual chapters can speak to those with specific interests in these fields. While I would not want to consider the book’s conclusions to be generalizable, I would like to think that some of its methods are portable and can spark ideas for others working in neighboring fields or for students in a seminar on media historiography.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

KA: I am currently researching global histories of media education in the 1970s with specific attention to transnational partnerships involving universities, commercial media organizations, or government agencies in Southwest Asia. The first part of this project makes use of the archive of the M. Ali Issari’s Iran Film Project here at Michigan State University. I am also collaborating with Ehsan Khoshbakht on an illustrated guide to the popular cinema of Iran before the revolution. This volume will feature quality reproductions of poster art and film stills, and it will accompany efforts to program new preservations of popular Iranian films at festivals and film museums. 

 

Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 3, pp. 94-102)

Temp Love, Out of Sync

Consider the asynchrony of the trends in film music in Iran and the United States. What creative and marketing opportunities did this asynchrony afford? The film studios in midcentury Iran used American scores composed when the pendulum had swung away from compilation scoring norms of 1930s Hollywood. Then, by the late 1960s both industries had swung past each other in the opposite directions. Just as Hollywood was rediscovering the compilation score and directors were rekindling their temp love, the film industry in Iran began to favor original scores from its own composers, and its remaining compilations turned away from their rowdier past. The cyclical trends for or against compilation were, for these two industries, about as far apart as they could be. 

This was the period in which Max Steiner, Hollywood’s celebrated golden-age composer, famously spoke out against the compilation score. It was a period in which he helped to consolidate control of the score around the composer, and film studios packaged and sold this music apart from the films as part of a campaign of tie-in branding. These efforts created the conditions of recognizability that inadvertently gave the scores their currency in compilations abroad. It is important to see these scores made in Iran as a creative interaction not just with found melodies but with the commercial life of this branded property. The patterns of sampling film music at midcentury were wildly out of sync with the commercial trends that produced the source material, which made it possible to resynchronize new forms of recognizability and commercial viability. 

[…] 

Some recycled scores in Iran appeared at the speed of global fashion. Remember that while some of these scores came from film prints themselves, better sound quality could be transferred to magnetic tape from commercial LPs. Vinyl was both stable and fast. Music editors’ collections were archived over years to be sure, but vinyl could circulate in ways that distributor-controlled film prints could not. This portable format met with a nimble soundtrack technique in which all dialogue, music, and effects were recorded and assembled last, with the rapidity of a temporary preview track. This resourceful production method not only saved time and money, it gave the industry opportunities to create novel forms of tie-in simultaneity. One way to trace this simultaneity is to compare newspaper exhibition records for Hollywood films in Iran with the release dates of the Iranian films that recycle their scores. It turns out that some Iranian filmmakers were able to integrate music quickly enough to score their own films with musical themes from imports that were still playing in first-run cinemas. 

The score for Fereshtei dar Khane-ye Man (An Angel in My House, Armais Aghamaliyan, 1963), edited by Dariush Azizi at Golden Age studio, opens with the piano theme from Billy Wilder’s The Apartment to accompany its nighttime shots of busy Tehran streets. The LP, Theme from The Apartment, was one of several cross-promotional efforts that succeeded on the music charts in the early 1960s. With this film, United Artists piloted rack sales of albums in cinema lobbies. The company expanded the program when the promotion proved profitable. The Apartment hit US theaters in 1960, but it premiered in Iran in October 1963 at the Moulin Rouge cinema in Tehran. An Angel in My House was released this same year. The soundtrack played in Iran simultaneously for Aghamalian’s urban melodrama and Wilder’s cynical sex comedy about the postwar managerial class. The choice gives Angel’s opening a contemporary feel. Wilder’s ironic uses of the song’s sentimentality are not conveyed in the new context, but something about its source still stands out. It would not have been unreasonable to expect it to be recognized given the commercial success of the album, the film itself, and the narrative significance of that particular song within the film. The Rickshaw Boy LP features visibly in the diegesis of The Apartment as a running cynical gag. Wilder’s film also had prestige associations in Tehran. The Moulin Rouge was a high-end cinema, and Jack Lemon was on his way to becoming a major star in Iran.

The same accelerated sampling happens with the score for the James Bond film From Russia with Love (Terrence Young, 1963). The film was released in Iran two years later with the descriptive title A Trap for James Bond. John Barry’s score for the film follows the other big-theme composers with its pop melodies tuned to marketing opportunitiesIt was Barry’s first in a series of Bond scores, which helped the franchise become famous for its branded music. The theme tied record sales and radio play to the film in most markets, but in Iran audiences may have heard it first in a locally produced thriller. Delirium (sound by Mohammad Mohammadi) was released in Iran the same year as A Trap for James Bond, and it makes use of two cues from Barry’s score. The musical cues in Delirium, as in Angel, do not call back to time-tested classic scores. They play simultaneously with anticipated new releases at first-run theaters. The business ties between Hollywood film companies and record subsidiaries by 1958, and the stylistic changes in theme music that followed, encouraged multimedia commercial viability. Simultaneous screenings of films that were produced seven thousand miles apart but that make use of the same scores illustrate how such commercial strategies could be repurposed.

In some cases, collage sound in films made in Iran may have traveled faster to cinemas than the original films for which the scores were composed. Take Hollywood’s orientalist battle spectacle Taras Bulba (J. Lee Thompson, 1962). The film did fine in the United States, but Franz Waxman’s score received radio play, multiple commercial releases, and awards nominations. I do not have an Iranian exhibition record for Taras Bulba, but I have found an instance of its soundtrack in the Iranian film Zamin-e Talkh (Bitter Earth, Khosrow Parvizi, 1963), which was released less than three months after a limited American release of Taras Bulba. The Iranian premiere of the score, in a compilation credited to Parvizi himself, must have preceded the local distribution of the film by at least a year. It even preceded some key US markets, as the film followed a standard staggered release pattern. As a result, when moviegoers in some US cities heard Waxman’s score for the film on opening night, they were hearing a score that Parvizi had already presented to Tehran audiences weeks earlier in his own take on the western genre. The score for a Yul Brenner action film set in the Eurasian Steppe had been reattached to a cowboy movie made in Iran before the Hollywood film had completed its first run in its own domestic market. The Waxman-Parvizi vector, outpacing the United Artists domestic release schedule, offers an acute example of what can be discovered when one replaces linear arguments about temporal delay with inquiries into circulation’s layered chronologies.

Iran’s temp love was all about the odd timing. Commercially available recordings of film music, products of one industry’s rejection of compilation scoring, transformed into a working archive for another industry’s exploration of the possibilities of compilation. The products of the cross-promotional strategies of Hollywood and its record subsidiaries around 1960 could be retooled for other kinds of crossings on the sound stripes of films and in the public venues that screened them. These processes help us to challenge assumptions that circulation follows a linear chronology from origin to destination with a kind of dilution marking each step. It shows that Iranian sound editors, who (like the composers they sampled) were keen to craft music with publicity in mind, took advantage of these records’ acclaim while reshuffling their linear timelines. They could return to a 1930s soundtrack over decades, create resourceful affinities with contemporary films, and even leapfrog Hollywood films’ domestic release schedules. Tracking patterns of recognizable sound draws attention to these essential networks of exchange without implying that asynchrony is a one-way street. 

New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.