Resistance time: an atlas of conflicted temporalities

Abstract

Despite 70 years of conflict and international pressure which, restricts the circulation of Palestinian narratives and memories globally (Said 1984), Palestine became a symbol of struggle and resistance to colonialism. From a collection of contemporary (audio)visual documents, this study seeks to identify and systematise impressions of time on images of these conflict zones, especially in Gaza and the West Bank. More specifically, the research aims to elaborate an approach to elucidate the peculiarities of the temporal experience in political regimes ruled through necropower (Mbembe, 2003). Facing the occupation of the territory by the State of Israel, the Palestinian politics relies in objects of memory to preserve the Nation under a regime of systematic fragmentation. The corpus of analysis consists of contemporary films on the question of Palestine and posters archive from the Palestinian resistance. As a hypothesis, the thesis claims that the Palestinian archives unveil a temporality based on resistance, namely “resistance time”. Resistance, in this context, refers to the exercise of survival, preservation of memory and a sense of “revolution” with the back turned to the future. With this peculiar temporal experience in mind, the investigation will address a myriad of mediums looking for traits of resistance and the patterns emerging from it in a quest for a preliminary vocabulary on grassroots resistance and temporalities.