Synopses & Reviews
In Visual Occupations Gil Z. Hochberg shows how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. Hochberg analyzes various works by Palestinian and Israeli artists, among them Elia Suleiman, Rula Halawani, Sharif Waked, Ari Folman, and Larry Abramson, whose films, art, and photography challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict. These artistsand#39; creation of new ways of seeingandmdash;such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artistsand#39; exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness andmdash;offers a crucial gateway, Hochberg suggests, for overcoming and undoing Israeland#39;s militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.
Review
andquot;Focusing on the politics of visuality, Visual Occupations engages the Zionist narrative in its various scopic manifestations, while also offering close readings of a wide range of contemporary artistic representations of a conflictual zone. Through such key notions as concealment, surveillance, and witnessing, the book insightfully examines the uneven access to visual rights that divides Israelis and Palestinians. Throughout, Gil Z. Hochberg sharply accentuates the tensions between visibility and invisibility within a context of ongoing war and violence. Visual Occupations makes a vital and informed contribution to the growing field of Israel/Palestine visual culture studies.andquot;
Review
andquot;Gil Z. Hochbergandrsquo;s brilliant and lucidly written text provides a vivid analysis of the sharp limits on visibility in Palestine/Israel. The expulsions of Palestinians in 1948 are invisible in Israel, and yet they continue to haunt its citizens and mobilize Palestinian resistance. Palestinians under occupation are hyper-visible, as victims and militants, and they seek both non-spectacular images and a measure of opacity. Through her critical readings of an array of Palestinian and Israeli artistic works, Hochberg offers other ways of looking and being seen in this vastly unequal field of visibility.andquot;
Review
andquot;Both Visual Occupations and Digital Militarism are ultimately about the gaze, about the ability of Israelis to see themselves as perpetrators and about the ability of Palestinians to return, refuse, or otherwise manage the disciplining gaze of military and international aid organizations alike. Kuntsman and Stein, and Hochberg all demand that their readers see a long violence in pictures of events that might be taken as spectacular or ruptural, in images that seem to show nothing at all.andquot;
Review
andquot;Hochbergand#39;s is a timely and important book that demonstrates that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is determined in and by the visual realm and through the shape of visual fields.... Visual Occupations reveals the great extent to which the Israeli occupation of Palestine is interwoven and deeply embedded in the visual politics of cultural productionandmdash;informing its content, framing, form, message, and even executionandmdash;yet the visibility of this influence is not always apparent.andquot;
Synopsis
Gil Z. Hochberg examines films, photography, painting and literature by Israeli and Palestinian artists. Israeland#39;s greater ability to control what can be seen, how, and from what position drives the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The artists Hochberg studies challenge Israeland#39;s visual and social dominance by creating new ways to see the conflict.
About the Author
Gil Z. Hochberg is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Gender Studies at UCLA. She is the author of
In Spite of Partition: Jews, Arabs and the Limits of Separatist Imagination.
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction. Visual Politics at a Conflict Zone 1
Part I. Concealment
1. Visible Invisibility: On Ruins, Erasure, and Haunting 37
2. From Invisible Spectators to the Spectacle of Terror: Chronicles of a Contested Citizenship 57
Part II. Surveillance
3. The (Soldierand#39;s) Gaze and the (Palestinian) Body: Power, Fantasy, and Desire in the Militarized Contact Zone 79
4. Visual Rights and the Prospect of Exchange: The Photographic Event Placed under Duress 97
Part III. Witnessing
5. andquot;Nothing to Look Atandquot;; or, andquot;For Whom Are You Shooting?andquot;: The Imperative to Witness and the Menace of the Global Gaze 115
6. Shooting War: On Witnessing Oneand#39;s Failure to See (on Time) 139
Closing Words 163
Notes 167
Bibliography 187
Index 207