Palestine and Archives

“An archivist is the superhuman who has the power to erase you from history” (text on the tote bag).

The first time I learned about Israel-Palestine in an academic setting, not through news media, was when I took Ella Shohat’s graduate seminar called 'Imaging Israel and Palestine’ as a Ph.D. student in 2009. One of the topics we studied was the erasure of (access to) Palestinian archives as a way of denying the Palestinians’ existence. Many historical records in the 20th century had been lost, destroyed or confiscated by the Israeli military, or they remained inaccessible to historians. Many historians turned to memoirs and personal photography collections to study Palestinian lives before 1948 (e.g. Walid Khalidi’s book on photographic history of the Palestinians).

We studied the politics of archives, historiography, and archaeology. Western narratives and images of the Holy Land-- including 18th-century travel writing, 19th-century photography, cinema (e.g. Lumière Brothers), and Altneuland, a novel by founder of political Zionism Theodor Herzl— have all contributed to the image of Palestine as a “land without a people for a people without a land" and thus justified colonialism in 1948. To erase archives is to deny the right to tell the story, which returns us to Edward Said’s question: Who has the permission to narrate?

I ended up doing my own (contemporary) research but the seminar has largely influenced my political stance, my novel, and the way I think about travel narratives and colonialism.