Israel/Palestine: Border Representations in Literature and Film

Description

Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian movement. Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers have grappled with the spread of these borders. Focusing on the works of Elia Suleiman, Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, it traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence and has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Depictions of these borders interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable, imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement. List of Figures Note on Translation and Transliteration Acknowledgements 1 Introduction: Excess, Illusion and the Border I Expanding Borders 2 Return to the Border: Commitment, Utopia and the Inescapable Green Line 3 Sayed Kashua, the Palestinian Hebrew Novel and the Failure of Coexistence II Deceptive Borders 4 Border Crossings and Stray Narratives of Return 5 Does the Camera Lie? Or, How to Document the Wall 6 The Illusion of the One-way Mirror: Filming the Checkpoint in Divine Intervention 7 Conclusion: Physical and Fictional Borders Bibliography Filmography Index