Archival Afterlives in a Conflict Zone: Animating the Past in Jumana Manna’s Cinematic Fables of Pre-1948 Palestine

This essay engages with two essay-films by the Palestinian artist Jumana Manna in order to advance a conversation about the politics of the archive and the role of creative engagement with “minor archives” in generating antihegemonic, antinationalist, and off-centered memory paths. The possibilities opened at the level of artistic representation by acting on the archive—altering, reenacting, reproducing and relocating it—are central themes in Hochberg’s discussion, as are the related questions about the temporality of the archive, the role of ethnography, and Orientalism, in both limiting and facilitating the creation of alternative counter-dominant narratives that challenge notions of (national) coherence and cultural authenticity and purity.