Abstract

This article argues for the urgency of positing visual forms as sites through which to further develop the framework of dialogical and multi-directional memory in narrating the histories of Israel/Palestine as well as other spaces where a contest for a national homeland has been circumscribed within limited notions of identity. First, it revisits the writings of scholars who have laid the theoretical groundwork through which to challenge the orthodoxy of the nation-centric positions in Israel/Palestine and who embed them within the larger project of decolonization. Second, it points to the necessity of incorporating the theories of biopolitics and necropolitics to understand how power operates in producing the archive of memory. Third, it analyzes contemporary aesthetic strategies through which muted archives of memory have been activated and builds upon them to articulate the concept of “trans-national specularity,” forging comparisons across national borders and potentially beyond national imaginaries.