In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.

In Becoming Palestine, Gil Z. Hochberg examines how contemporary Palestinian artists, filmmakers, dancers, and activists use the archive in order to radically imagine Palestine's future. She shows how artists such as Jumana Manna, Kamal Aljafari, Larissa Sansour, Farah Saleh, Basel Abbas, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme reimagine the archive, approaching it not through the desire to unearth hidden knowledge, but to sever the identification of the archive with the past. In their use of archaeology, musical traditions, and archival film and cinematic footage, these artists imagine a Palestinian future unbounded from colonial space and time. By urging readers to think about archives as a break from history rather than as history's repository, Hochberg presents a fundamental reconceptualization of the archive's liberatory potential.

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing-such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness -offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artists' creation of new ways of seeing-such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness -offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

"Hochberg's political realism is supplemented with a specifically literary hope that reading can not only undo the effects of forgetting but expose the complex ties that bind Arab and Jew. Hochberg dares to articulate a shared history on the basis of a patient, copious, and persuasive reading of Arab and Jewish writers and critics, many of whom are not well understood by Anglophone readers. Through a disorientingly lucid, close, and provocative set of readings, she shows us that the cultural imagination has its crucial place in articulating the prospects for peace. She makes good on the claim that memory is crucial to imagining anew."--Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley

"Hochberg's book is a poignant and rigorous demonstration of the power of literature to provide a space of cohabitation and confrontation that is an alternative to 'the logic of partition.' An important and timely intervention that will be of interest to all those who seek ways out of the impasses created by racial, cultural, religious, or political differences."--Francoise Lionnet, University of California, Los Angeles

"This book is a testimony to the healing power of literature, its capacity to resist the mutilating logic of a social and political world whose realities it refuses simply to mirror. It deserves to be read by anyone who has the courage to imagine that underlying a conflict played out on a landscape disfigured by separating barriers, hideous walls, and strangling checkpoints, there persists the quintessentially human desire to reunite what has been separated, to share, to be equal, to be in common-and even to love."--Saree Makdisi, University of California, Los Angeles

"GilHochberg's "In Spite of Partition" provides a fascinating literary context that opens new directions for discussing the relation between the signifiers 'Arab' and 'Jew.' Dedicated to a close reading of Jewish and Arab authors who are rarely discussed together and who subvert the dichotomy between Arabs and Jews, the book will interest many readers."--Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin, Ben Gurion University

""In Spite of Partition" makes a seminal contribution to the study of Israel and Palestine, one that will influence the development of a number of disciplines, particularly history and comparative literature. It is extremely well written, and Hochberg has a strong command of the material."--Mark Levine, University of California, Irvine

Through his work as a scholar, as a critic, and as a political commentator, Edward Said asked insistently: Who speaks? For what and whom? How does an intellectual articulate his or her place in the West? Or in the developing world? What is the specific contribution and intervention to be made by the intellectual? This Social Text special issue in memory of Said examines how he challenged established authority and identity with these questions and shaped a culture of criticism.