Decolonizing [in the] future: scenes of Palestinian temporality

Abstract

This article is published as part of the Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography special issue ‘Palestinian Futures Anticipation, Imagination, Embodiments', edited by Mikko Joronen, Helga Tawil-Souri, Merav Amir & Mark Griffiths. ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine different treatments of the future in Palestine through four scenes. I argue that the four scenes offer a reorientation of Palestinian temporality, in which there exists a multiplicity of temporal orderings of the past and the future. I situated Palestinian futures as imagined and communicated by Palestinian artists against the hegemonic narrative of a futurity that single out the path to statehood as the ultimate future for Palestine. I show that despite the violence that the Israeli state inflicts on Palestinian daily life, which affects their ability to imagine something else outside the immediate everyday, Palestinian struggle for liberation is always already future-oriented. The four scenes suggest that the future for Palestinians resides in the working of the imaginative in which the future might evoke a past or haunt the present. Thus, when read closely, Palestinian temporality can be viewed as cyclical, not linear. In Aamer Hlehel’s play, the past haunts the future, while in Hadeel’s Assali’s letter the past describes the liberated future. The continuous loss is enfolded into future traces in the form of memory in Samar Hazboun’s work, and in the form of evidence, or daleel- in Jawad’s Al Malhi’s work.