The Palestinian Idea: Film, Media, and the Radical Imagination (Insubordinate Spaces)

Is there a link between the colonization of Palestinian lands and the enclosing of Palestinian minds? The Palestinian Idea argues that it is precisely through film and media that hope can occasionally emerge amidst hopelessness, emancipation amidst oppression, freedom amidst apartheid. Greg Burris employs the work of Edward W. Said, Jacques Rancière, and Cedric J. Robinson in order to locate Palestinian utopia in the heart of the Zionist present.

He analyzes the films of prominent directors Annemarie Jacir (Salt of This Sea, When I Saw You) and Hany Abu-Assad (Paradise Now) to investigate the emergence and formation of Palestinian identity. Looking at Mais Darwazah’s documentary My Love Awaits Me By the Sea, Burris considers the counterhistories that make up the Palestinian experience—stories and memories that have otherwise been obscured or denied. He also examines Palestinian (in)visibility in the global media landscape, and how issues of Black-Palestinian transnational solidarity are illustrated through social media, staged news spectacles, and hip hop music.

• Palestine Collection
• In the Wake of the Poetic: Palestinian Artists After Darwish (Contemporary Issues in the Middle East)
• Where the Line Is Drawn: A Tale of Crossings, Friendships, and Fifty Years of Occupation in Israel-Palestine
• Inside/Outside: Six Plays from Palestine and the Diaspora
• A Child in Palestine: The Cartoons of Naji al-Ali
• Why Did You Leave the Horse Alone?
• The Parisian
• Nakba +100: Stories from a century after the catastrophe
• Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
• Palestinian Cinema: Landscape, Trauma, and Memory