Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (eds.), Producing Palestine: The Creative Production of Palestine through Contemporary Media (Bloomsbury, 2024).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar (HTS & DM): This book was a collaborative project with the many contributors and which we worked on prior to the current genocide. We wanted to address “new” media and technologies (even if these were reconceptualizations of something “old”) and were interested in organic, non-mainstream, oppositional forms of mediation rather than institutional or hegemonic ones: “texts” and spaces that had not been written about much which consider what Palestinians themselves are doing and how and why, how Palestinian-ness is expressed and (re)conceived, what Palestine becomes. In short, we wanted to focus on contemporary visions and expressions and look at how media, technologies, screens, and platforms enable forms of creative production.
We were keen to consider how our world is increasingly marked by screens and spaces of mediation, open to both liberating and oppressive processes, depending on how these are built and used, by whom, to what ends, in what ways, and under which conditions. Screens and spaces of mediation nowadays are much more than simply television sets and cinemas, or books and magazines. They include maps, databases, apps, snapchats, film footage shot on phones, graffitied surfaces, and posters, as well as kites, photo albums, games, windows, stickers, and selfies. These have become the spaces, infrastructures, and elements on, in, and through which we experience so much of the world. These new visions and new technologies evoke questions well beyond those of representation and invite us to think about issues such as reality and illusion, surface and depth, visibility and obsolescence, presence and ephemerality, temporality and distance, and more… And we were interested in bringing together these questions in relation to Palestine, Palestinians, and Palestinianness, across multiple geographies and periods.
Producing Palestine was conceived with the aim of addressing a discernible increase in the production of Palestine—through (“new”) technologies, screens, infrastructures, ways of doing. It was also conceived with the hope of accessing, and making accessible, Palestine through the process of its production.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
HTS & DM: The book addresses the creative production of Palestine in diverse spaces and cultural genres by multiple actors. In focusing on the action and activity of producing and production, we consider the complexity of the social, of recognizing that there is no single dominant hegemony that is to be filled with different content, but rather that “Palestine” is about the possibilities that emerge through social arrangements of varying scales that operate in the production of life and (his)stories.
The cases (rather than traditional academic “chapters”) are organic, deliberate, contingent on one another; they themselves are forms of creative labor production that attempt to blur the distinction between a (media) producer, artist, reader, interpreter, scholar. They bring together production that includes games, personal and archival photographs, films, graffiti, posters, TikTok videos, memories, food, music, the kuffiyeh, digital maps, everyday objects, drone footage, among others, and reflect on, demonstrate, partake in, and generate multiple expressions and imaginaries of producing Palestine. Collectively, they theorize the transcendent activities taking place across media, across languages, across temporalities, across geographies, and across disciplines as modes of productive labor that take place in relation to how Palestine has been and continues to be presented, represented, misrepresented—"contained,” if you will—from both within and without.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
HTS & DM: The book continues our collaboration on critically engaging with Palestine and Palestinians. In our first edited book, Gaza as Metaphor (2016), we used the concept metaphor to think of how Gaza itself had become a metaphor and metonym for the Palestinian condition. In this book, we focus on the imaginative production of Palestine in diverse spaces, therefore addressing questions related to media, mediation, and production that are central quotidian practices in the contemporary period.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
HTS & DM: We hope this book will be read by a wide range of readers, students, scholars, activists, journalists, artists, producers of all sorts, and NGOs. Readers that already know about Palestine and those for whom Palestine is new. We envision the book to provide a different and agentive reading and explanation of what Palestine means, how Palestinians themselves engage with expressing, representing, creating themselves in and beyond mediated spaces, and an understanding of how Palestine is and has come to be a global symbol of resistance, struggle, and birth and death.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
DM: I am currently editing a book on political communication in the Middle East and North Africa in which I have a chapter about the necessity to look at storytelling and oral history as politics in the margin and spaces for producing anti-colonial knowledge. I am also working on other chapters and journal articles related to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I hope to embark on a follow-up monograph to my first one, “What it means to be Palestinian,” focusing on the Palestinian diaspora and imaginations of Palestinian-ness in the context of a permanent war.
J: How can we problematize and rethink media in all its forms during livestreamed genocide and excessive violence?
HTS & DM: The final edits of the volume took place after October 2023, during the first months of carnage in Gaza. That renewed and magnified violence, combined with the destruction of media, the killing of journalists, the censorship and obfuscation of Palestinian voices, and yet also the emergence or presence of Palestinian voices, images, and stories circulating in ways they previously had not (through social media for example), made it clear that questions of self-representation and production were and remain important.
And while it is clear how much contemporary hegemonic forces and media outlets are a continuation or extension of a long history of dispossession and silencing of Palestinians and destruction of Palestinian life worlds, there is also no denying the increase in “pro-Palestine” solidarity and the widespread recognition of Palestine as part of, and increasingly understood as interlinked with, various forms of oppression and of struggle. We think that the existence of these, the increase and expansion of these actions, these fissures in hegemonic structures, are in part owed to what we call the (continuous) production of Palestine. As we wrote in the epilogue:
The urge and the action to document, to record, to describe, to perform, to express, to archive—in short, to produce—Palestine is not created only in response to or as a challenge against violence, dehumanization, or silencing; nor does it exigently draw on historical points chosen by Zionism, Israel, or others. We can and do produce without being held in opposition to others’ political or institutional objectives, whether material, discursive, psychic, or otherwise. The production of Palestine also traces roots and intertwines with circuits outside hegemonic constraints in all kinds of ways. We use our own slang, we have our own idioms, we connote our own meanings, and we reuse our own materials. What we produce, what we choose to mediatically (re)produce, imbricates our fabrics, herbs, utensils, colors, and fruits. We claim our own ruins, children, and martyrs, and decide which we render into symbols. Palestinians have agency. And production requires agency.
The renewed and expanded violence against Palestinians, the incessant attempt to obliterate and silence Palestinians, and yet the ongoing expressions from within and outside of Palestine, only demonstrate to us how important it is to document, to archive, and even to celebrate what is produced in the now. Because we still believe that it is production that grounds us in the act of making and being engaged in and with the world.
Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar, “Producing Palestine: Representational (Im)possibilities,” pages 1 to 13)
Palestine has often been defined and constructed in the global imaginary by (as) conflict, resistance, oppression and violence. Palestine is so overridden with claims, associations, and conflicting representations, continuously “framed, hedged about, shaped, controlled, and surveilled from every possible perspective” that, in WJT Mitchell’s words: “it is a wonder that the earth’s crust does not buckle under their weight.” Yet Palestine, to Palestinians especially, also remains inaccessible: an ongoing settler-colonial experiment that is exclusionary and violent in its destruction and attempted erasure, a scattering of fragmented and diminishing lands locked up behind walls on the other side of which are disappearing traces of erased villages, an expanding and distant diaspora forbidden from return or even a visit, a political project and cultural identity that are continually contested whose past existence and narratives are contested too.
Because of the multitude of claims and counterclaims, representations and misrepresentations, Palestinian cultural expression and production is frequently attempting to “correct” or readjust these representational politics, while also contending with continued and changing forms of representations, repression, silencing, and erasure. Moreover, the relationship of Palestinians to Palestine is often defined by inaccessibility, by immobility and insecurity, and thus, again, Palestinian cultural production contends not only with how to disrupt the current order of things, but with how to access, how to preserve the disappearing and ephemeral, how to survive and make meaning out of and despite continuous political impasses, how to conjure a future that is generative and inclusive rather than forlorn and exclusionary. As such, grasping Palestine, accessing Palestine, depicting Palestine, and even “correcting” the image of Palestine, in short, producing Palestine, is a multilayered activity, mobilized by various actors taking myriad different routes (not all of which are tangible), relying on both “old” and “new” technologies, stimulating and in some cases also simulating new visualizations, realizing Palestine while also contending with its possible and impossible horizons.
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“Producing” Palestine, we suggest, refers to a series of overlapping active processes: the experimentation and experience that take place through cultural, mediatic, and technological modes of action; through analysis, juxtaposition, and challenging of these creations by an array of “producers”; through interpretation of all of these by “readers,” which in turn (re)invigorate new creative expressions. Creative production is undertaken at multiple points, by multiple actors, successively and simultaneously considering, generating and reinscribing what is and what remains possible. Producing Palestine, thus, means to actively partake in transcendent activities across media, across languages, across temporalities, across geographies, and most certainly across disciplines.
Producing Palestine refers not simply to a monitoring or documenting project, or only a theoretical or speculative undertaking; it is an enlivened and enlivening praxis that engages “producers” and “readers” (as kinds of producers themselves) of different kinds. Our orientation around production is based on the recognition that all social formations are heterogeneous arrangements and relations – of material and immaterial forces, of matter, images, desires, languages, technologies, among other processes – that resonate together. This productive labor is complex, time-consuming, individual and collaborative, conceptual, interpretive, relational, perhaps ultimately also ontological. This kind of labor also occurs in continuous relation to how Palestine has been and continues to be presented, represented, misrepresented – ‘contained’ if you will – from both within and without.
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“Producing Palestine” as a process allows us to theorize the dynamics between media and politics beyond dominant approaches that remain bounded by Eurocentric privileging of media as an anchor in social practices that have emerged within the closed worlds of media organizations and structures. Such a proposition demands a critical engagement with continuous meaning-making and productive labor of and by ordinary people within and beyond formal structures or institutions. It also demands interrogation of the overused concept of representation as reductive, particularly when talking about colonized Palestine, because of its genesis in Western epistemologies, and its unfolding within specific contexts of histories and institutions of empire. Producing Palestine underlines the act of production by Palestinians transformed — and able to transform themselves — through their knowing practices and structures of feeling. For it is through practices that the intersections of knowledge, embodied action, and social life comes alive. Producing is thus a moment of vitality, of turning into something living, a moment of (political) becoming, an act that becomes part of a common moment and participates in the articulation of the collective’s potential.
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Media can function as venues and means for historical context and memory. When the arsenal of political and military strategies used by the Israeli state has meant the literal erasure of Palestinian presence on the land, media depicting the making of local dishes, the ability to digitally map and layer, and (re)connect through reincarnation, illuminate that displacement, and reveal a past life that continues its existence in another form, becomes relevant. Media thus testify to Palestinian attachment to spatiality, severed as it is by occupation and exile, attesting to a continued presence, keeping the claims of Palestinian belonging alive, and visible. Media demonstrate and are part of the quotidian resilience of a systemically oppressed community who prevails despite destruction, displacement, and disenfranchisement.
We produce media often because of their potential to function as centralizing spaces that act as and are nodes of our sociality and promote human interaction. We create card games, paint murals, share photographs, or make videos to bring us together. These do not merely depict or represent forms of resistance or activism (or any other politics) by themselves but are inextricably bound in political discourses. They demand, sometimes even command, space in discourses whose limits are no longer solely determined by institutional gatekeepers such as museums, national news stations, or multinational corporations. Rather, like memes gone viral, they can emerge as their own political and visual language, that is, to some degree, beyond the realm of mediation, enacting their own generative politics. They carve out the space to construct (new) publics and means of conversations in and through networks that are transnational or global that do not necessarily succumb to—or are solely constructed by—the institutional or geopolitical.
Media production of Palestine has become and is more quotidian: easy, daily, accessible for more people to participate in, to create and co-create, to interpret and make meaning of, to riff on and be playful, to disassemble and reassemble. Less and less is held, determined, or controlled by institutional forms. Politics then happens not only in formal spaces but in cooking, furtive crossings, singing, graffitying, digital mapping, donning a keffiyeh. Politics happens in unexpected places and through unremarked practices. Politics is everywhere.
Media are subjunctive: they provide presence and legibility, both of which hinge on being there, being recognized, being “seen” by others, enacting the demands of collective life. A website, an Instagram post, a documentary film, and an app are spaces where and through which Palestinians practice those rights. These perform a broader, transnational, mobile, global visuality that is central to self-expression and recognition. The operations facilitated by (“new”) media are not only imminent to the rupture of hegemony but are also constitutive of (political) life itself.
In being subjunctive, media also make visible what is imagined or wished possible, providing spaces for articulation, experimentation, speculation, immanence. Spoons, drones, maps, posters, virtual reality become artifacts, tools, technologies, sites, infrastructures, and relations through which Palestinians engage in acts of world-building. The potentialities of the medium shape the perceptual and relational nature of experience, of a particular mode of subjectivity and the kinds of actions that are embedded in it. They display, reconstitute, and re-engender distinct subjectivities.
Virtual representations of the Palestinian space have long acted as tools to communicate certain political claims and to produce geopolitical territorial arrangements. Representations of Palestinians have also been part of the decolonial and revolutionary struggles for liberation. What is different today is the coming together of these elements. Films, websites, digital archiving tools, maps, photographs, and tweets, among others, are not just evocative but result in an expansion of what Palestine is.
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Over the past few decades, the “power” of media, and our theorization thereof, has been enlarged or expanded, not because of informational or computational quotients and measures but by the ways through which they reshape visibility, spatiality, subjectivity, and agency. Palestine, then, is interpreted not only to be as strictly a story of the territory lost to Israel but as an engagement with the production of media. In the latter, space is necessarily open. Palestine becomes a process that emerges through that practice and its constant “reterritorialization.” In other words, films, websites, digital archives, mapping apps, posters, graffiti circulating on social media, photographs, and recipes, among other examples brought together in this book, are not simply detached and marginal cultural or virtual expressions but part of the reconfigurations of (political) power.