The Imperial Condition of Photography in Palestine: Archives, Looting, and the Figure of the Infiltrator

Autor: Ariella Azoulay
Rok vydání: 2017
Předmět:
Zdroj: Visual Anthropology Review. 33:5-17
ISSN: 1548-7458
1058-7187
Popis: In front of many cameras and representatives of the international community that surround him, unexpectedly, and outside of any protocol that was prepared for this occasion, an elderly Palestinian man dares to stop, to withdraw his consent to leave his home and ceases to move. This old man is my companion in exploring the archives and attempting to understand its implication in the invention of the figure of “infiltrator.” Together, we refrain from studying his figure, as defined by the nation-state that forced him out of his home. Halting precisely where many cameras were present, this person threatens to spoil the orchestrated spectacle of Arabs “leaving of their will.” Together, we study the linkage between the expulsion of several hundred thousands of Palestinians and the looting of a vast treasure of books, documents, and photographs from Palestinians in 1948 and their transformation into “abandoned files” in the newly constructed Israeli archives at the same time. The article proposes to relate to the ongoing looting of archives not merely as a violation of Palestinian property and rights, but rather as a continuous performance of national sovereignty. Sovereignty is performed as the continued project of partition of populations into distinct, differentiated groups, whereby violence among the two groups is both the pretext and the effect.
Databáze: OpenAIRE
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