| Summary: | Since the early 1990s, Israel has greatly expanded a system checkpoints, walls and other barriers in the West Bank and Gaza that restrict Palestinian mobility. As a result, such border spaces have become ubiquitous elements of everyday life, with profound political, socio-cultural, and economic effects. Israel/Palestine examines how authors and filmmakers in the West Bank, Gaza, and Israel have grappled with the spread and impact of these borders in the period since the Oslo Accords of 1994. Focusing on novels by Raba’i al-Madhoun, Ghassan Kanafani, Sami Michael and Sayed Kashua, and films by Elia Suleiman, Simon Bitton, Emad Burnat, and Guy Davidi, Israel/Palestine traces how political engagement in literature and film has shifted away from previously common paradigms of resistance and coexistence. Instead, it has become reorganised around these now ubiquitous physical barriers. Using strategies of narrative fragmentation, multivocality, metafiction, fantasy, and silence to depict the effects of these borders, authors and filmmakers interrogate the notion that such spaces are impenetrable and unbreakable by revealing their deceptive and illusive qualities. In doing so, they also imagine distinct forms of protest, and redefine the relationship between cultural production and political engagement.
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