Palestine Time: Temporality, Cinema, Liberation

Zionism does not only colonize space; it also colonizes time. Likewise, its great adversary, the Palestinian freedom movement, is not just a struggle to regain home and hearth; it is a struggle to liberate time itself. This temporal dimension of the conflict is manifested in a variety of ways—in dueling narratives of the past, conflicting conceptions of history, contradicting visions of the future, the use and abuse of archaeology, allochronic projections onto the Other, the marking of significant dates and holy days, contesting uses of daylight saving time, and even the development of timed explosives. Moreover, in Palestine and Israel, time is often experienced differently—for instance, between a person driving a car in fast-paced Tel Aviv and another waiting at a checkpoint in the occupied West Bank. In the wake of great tragedies and traumas, time can even be perceived as standing still. Palestine Time: Temporality, Cinema, Liberation aims to explore this hitherto unappreciated aspect of the conflict: the battlefield of time itself. Utilizing the work of Ghassan Kanafani and Ernst Bloch as its theoretical lens, Palestine Time examines this temporal dimension by investigating an array of contemporary Palestinian and Israeli cultural texts, including films.