Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East

“An archive fever has been coursing through the Palestinian body politic for two decades now,” observes Beshara Doumani, with a nod to Jacques Derrida, in his introduction to the program for the 2017 annual meeting of “New Directions in Palestinian Studies.”¹ The meeting theme was “the politics of archives and the practices of memory” and its guiding question was “What does it mean for the colonized, the disenfranchised, and the displaced to produce narratives through archival and memorial practices?” The questions that followed paired memory and archive, highlighting the colonial and national struggles they both engaged: “How are archives and memories produced, assembled, and mobilized in settler colonial contexts? In what ways are archives and memories sites of struggle and appropriation, and looting? How can we theorize archives and memory from perspectives critical of state-centric political configurations and conventional concepts of sovereignty?”

Yet the practices of archiving and the political and imaginative work that archiving, handling archives, and searching and ordering them entail demand special attention. The essays in this forum on what we might call “Palestine: Doing Things with Archives” explore the challenges and political possibilities of archives. They not only do what historians excel at—uncovering or illuminating past moments that reframe our understandings of the past and present—but they linger on less conventional questions of the materialities and affects of archives, as well as the formidable challenges archives present for assembly, authority, access, categorization, and political futures. What archives are or should be in this case of a dispersed people with no state archive, no less a state, a majority of whom live in exile or under occupation and have had their “proper” archive destroyed, seized, or sealed in inaccessible colonial archives belonging to those who dispossessed them and still rule over them with force, are tough questions.

In the essays on memory that Ahmad H. Sa’di and I published a decade ago in Nakba: Palestine, 1948, and the Claims of Memory, scholars drew on “archives” of various sorts, from oral histories to village memory books, from testimonies in court cases to storytelling, whether in films, camps, or family settings, to reflect on the politics of collective memory in moral and historical claims about the foundational historical injustice of the Zionist expulsion of Palestinians from their lands. Our concerns were the complex [End Page 3] workings of memory and witness and the subversive power of counter-memories.

Historians tend to be more confident about seeking truths in the tangible remnants preserved in the archives of states, organizations, or personal collections than those who work on memory. Yet theorists of the archive like Ann Stoler have cautioned about this urge to uncover and recover truths, and the essays gathered here in this special section of CSSAAME similarly push us to think harder about the conditions of archiving and to attend closely to the ways archives are and could be used. Nevertheless, they do not discount the wonder (and sometimes shame) that discoveries in the archives occasion when they index the unexpected, the uncomfortable, and even the unimaginable of the past, given how history has unfolded.

Sherene Seikaly’s uncanny encounter with some family papers that included documents belonging to her great-grandfather confirmed, with exquisite and uncomfortable detail, arguments she had made about class and Palestinian “men of capital” in her book about the 1930s and 1940s. But it also revealed a new facet of such men whose fates were suddenly overturned: a stunning (and poignant, in retrospect) faith in bureaucratic process and rationality that led this cultured Palestinian businessman so suddenly dispossessed of his money and land to spend a lifetime trying to put in sober claims for what had been wrongly taken.

Sarah Gualtieri opens her essay with Edward Said’s concept of “traveling theory” to take us into a rarely referenced North American institutional node in which he produced some of his major works. She resituates the trilogy of the worldly exilic Palestinian scholar—Orientalism, The Question of Palestine, and Covering Islam—thanks to a “minor” archive now lying in boxes in Eastern Michigan, rescued by a longtime member of a once vibrant organization, the Arab American University Graduates. The minutes and correspondence contained in the archive testify to an earlier moment in the 1970s of what she considers Arab American activism, one that was transnational, pan-Arab, and world liberationist in outlook and solidarities.

Gil Hochberg’s essay on two of Jumana Manna’s films, A Magical Substance Flows into Me and the earlier A Sketch of Manners: Alfred Roch’s Last Masquerade, traces the outlines of a lost world of pre-1948 Palestine. The earlier film begins with a Palestinian photograph; the later one is about a sound archive put into Palestinian hands from an “archived archive buried and sealed away” in the Israeli National Library. Both films deploy the archival material in the present, the latter more forcefully. The archive of a Jewish German musicologist who came to Mandate Palestine in the 1930s uncovers how a humanism fused with Orientalism made this man refuse the insistent distinction between Arab and Jew that the emergent Zionist movement commanded, as well as the price he paid. But what is so innovative about the films, Hochberg notes, is that they relocate the archives in the present, in the case of A Magical Substance, unsettling certainties, suggesting alternatives, and discomfiting the communities from which, a world ago, came those recordings.

None of the essays suggest that archives are simple repositories. Yet it is Stoler who articulates most richly the problematic of a Palestinian archiving practice. Her reflections were occasioned by an invitation from Roger Heacock at Birzeit University to address the conundrums posed by an archive of over 10,000 documents amassed as part of an independent initiative of collective archiving. Among the striking aspects of her analysis of an archiving effort that she describes as a “pragmatic feat of imagination” are her insights about the vibrancy of the unexpected, the uncertainties of assemblage, and the affect infusing the handling of these fragments.² This affective chord runs through all the essays, whether in Hochberg’s description of the discomfort of awkward encounters portrayed in A Magical Substance between Manna and some of her interlocutors, or the breathlessness of Seikaly, the historian whose stock in trade is the archive but who gets shocked when she finds herself implicated. Ambivalent about what she is finding, she nevertheless is redeemed from feelings of shame that she had carried for years, ever since a brief encounter with a damning fragment [End Page 4] thrust at her by a fellow researcher in the Israeli National Archives.

At a more general level, a pervasive and subtle affect suffuses these essays on what archives can do and what we should do with Palestinian archives. It is hope. Positive words like enabling, emancipatory, revolutionary, disruptive, imaginations, alternatives, potentialities, and possibilities thread through them. Stoler sees in the challenges of participatory archiving outside of colonial or even nation-state control the political possibilities of what Jacques Rancière calls dissensus. Can archives “fissure the fictions of power politics,” as she puts it?³ Will digitalization further this effort, everyone is asking?

Archive fever is not going away. The Palestinian Museum in Birzeit that opened in 2016 seeks to be authoritative but not governmental and hopes to be enabling and inclusive. It is embarking this year on a major digital archiving project. If Stoler is right that Palestine is a way of being in the world as well as a place, then the reflections in this forum on what archives do and what we might do with archives could contribute to imagining this “emancimpossible” task, if I may adapt Emil Habiby’s crystallization of the Palestinian affective condition as “pessoptimism.”