Description
- Abstract:
- What does it mean to bear witness in contemporary Palestinian visual culture? This dissertation analyzes and historicizes Palestinian films and artworks that reconfigure witnessing as an imaginative act of decolonization. It argues for a model of witnessing that refracts the oppressive conditions of the present, and reconstructs unrealized political potential from the past, to animate visions of emergent rights and resurgent communities. Bearing witness emerges as a practice of worldbuilding and world repair. “Witnessing As Worldbuilding” contextualizes a turn towards fabulation, speculation, and opacity in Palestinian visual culture. It presents these strategies as critical responses to the political limitations of humanitarianism and the aesthetic restrictions of documentary realism, which have placed pressure on Palestinian artists to provide proof of their own oppression from the restrictive perspectives of sympathetic, suffering subjects. In the face of such pressures, the dissertation highlights opaque representations that do not reproduce fixed identities, but instead make sensible the social practices and political struggles that constitute Palestinian becoming. It analyzes fabulation as a mode of narrating counter-histories and imagining decolonized futures, an act of the radical narrative imagination that animates unrealized political potential glimpsed in the gaps of archives subjected to colonial violations. Further, it examines Palestinian speculations alongside Afrofuturism and Indigenous futurisms, arguing that “decolonial futurisms” reorient the speculative imagination from teleological conceptions of progress to a poetics and politics of worldbuilding in the wake of catastrophe, in which visions of the yet-to-come are always also returns to the practices, epistemologies, and dreams of those whose worlds were destroyed. In positing a poetic, oppositional mode of witnessing as worldbuilding, this dissertation engages with Black Studies scholarship on Afrofuturism, fabulation, opacity, and archives; Indigenous Studies literature on nonlinear temporalities, political refusals, and cultural practices of storytelling, visioning, and resurgence; and recent studies of Palestinian culture that argue for the power of imagination and emergence, rather than paradigms of visual evidence and ameliorative representation, in rethinking the politics of art in relation to the Palestinian condition.
- Notes:
- Thesis (Ph. D.)--Brown University, 2022
Citation
Estefan, Kareem,
"Witnessing As Worldbuilding: Practicing Decolonization in Palestinian Moving Images"
(2022).
Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:w79uazp4/
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Modern Culture and Media Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Modern Culture and Media department....