Palestine and the Aesthetics of the Future Impossible

Abstract

This essay explores how contemporary Palestinian cultural producers—across literature, art, and film—simultaneously expose and disrupt the chronopolitics of settler occupation. It pairs Adania Shibli's 2002 novella Masās (Touch) with the 2013 short film Condom Lead directed by Tarzan and Arab in order to theorize a poetics of the everyday. Their works generate an ontology of the present eschatologically bound to an emptied future time–space. The essay then turns to Khalil Rabah's conceptual multisite project the Palestinian Museum of Natural History and Humankind (2003) and Larissa Sansour's science fiction trilogy: A Space Exodus (2009), Nation Estate (2012), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015). Their projects engage in speculative modes of world-building that bridge past and future temporalities in order to render legible the unviability of the present. I situate these works, on the one hand, in relation to scholarship on affect and ṣumūd (steadfastness) in post-Oslo popular Palestinian cultural production. On the other, I put them into conversation with theorizations of counter-futurism and Afrofuturism as historical recovery projects. Read paratactically, this body of Palestinian art illustrates the critical potential of impossible acts of imagination.