دور الصورة الفوتوغرافية في بناء الهوية الفلسطينية

العناوين الأخرى

The role of Palestinian photographs in constructing Palestinian identity

مقدم أطروحة جامعية

فراج، اسليم

مشرف أطروحة جامعية

أبو الرب، محمد

الجامعة

جامعة بيرزيت

الكلية

كلية الآداب

القسم الأكاديمي

الدراسات العربية المعاصرة

دولة الجامعة

فلسطين (الضفة الغربية)

الدرجة العلمية

ماجستير

تاريخ الدرجة العلمية

2020

الملخص الإنجليزي

This study traced photographic images from their invention and the beginning of their use in Palestine to their circulation as press pictures in official Palestinian narratives and among creators of memory, considering the image a historical document, which is both a product of print capitalism, and a national product that expresses the nation itself.

The first objective of the research is to understand photography’s functional role in building Palestinian memory and identity through the images, symbols, and connotations it produces.

The second is to understand its cultural narratives in the various historical periods that Palestinians passed through, starting from Ottoman rule and the British Mandate, through the Nakba and the emergence of the contemporary Palestinian revolution, as the study assumes that photography played a basic role in engineering the Palestinian national story, which either establishes a collective amnesia or a collective remembrance.

To answer its questions, the study focuses on the description and understanding of print capitalism, in which the image found itself, and its connection to the national project, imagining the Palestinian self and laying the foundations of Palestinian identity.

The study concluded, based on its hypothesis, that on the historical level, in the first phase, photographic images of Palestine and Palestinians were influenced by colonialist Orientalist vision at a time when Palestinian cultural identity did not yet have its own clear vision regarding photography as a national product.

That image of Palestinians in the phase of Orientalism molded and patterned Palestinians within an oppositional, oriental vision that converged with Zionist colonial concepts, so that the methods of the colonial vision formed another extension of Orientalist photography.

The study concluded that the apparent absence of present-day evidence of a Palestinian photographic scene at the time was an intentional act by Zionism to conceal Palestinian social history by plundering Palestinian photographic treasures of the time period.

In its examination of the post-Nakba photographs, represented by UNRWA images, the study demonstrates the cultural distance assumed by UNRWA; UNRWA’s historical neglect in visually documenting the social narrative where Palestinian refugees existed; and a fragmentation of post-Nakba narratives in which UNRWA institutional documentary photography and the Orientalist photography style intertwined.

The study consists of four chapters in addition to the theoretical framework and the final conclusions.

The first of these five chapters links Palestinian identity in the frameworks of three basic theoretical concepts related to the reading of the image, its role in shaping cultural identity, in narration, and in establishing a national narrative.

The attempt to link these theories with Palestinian and international theorists of nationalism and memory rely on original proposals from Palestinians themselves and link them with the reading of the photographic image from a cultural point of view.

The study was not satisfied with classic international theories only; the second chapter discusses the creation of the Arab press at the end of the Ottoman period and the establishment of print capitalism, as well as the creation of a Palestinian national identity.

The third chapter examines European perceptions of Palestine, the widening of the Orientalist eye, the stereotyping of Palestinians with images evoked by Western and colonial standards, and the employment of the religious myth.

The fourth chapter, entitled “The Nakba of Photography,” examines attempts at visual knowledge with colonial eyes by examining the visual signs of Zionism alongside the absence of Palestinian images.

In addition, because of this absence, Palestinians were made to reside in another photographic sphere, refugee and humanitarian photography by UNRWA.

The Fifth chapter cover the rise of the Palestinian national movement and the unification of the Palestinian diaspora after 1964.

In this chapter, the study examined the discourse of the photograph in two national magazines, Falasteenuna and Falasteen Al-Thawra, because they functioned as visual mouthpieces for the PLO.

These magazines contain photographs from the First Intifada and depict the relationship of the PLO with the Intifada.

The study shows the way in which the Palestine Liberation Organization represented Palestinians by constructing imagery and translating it into photographs during the revolutionary period, and using it as a symbol to confirm the presence of a Palestinian national entity.

The study articulates the need for an inclusive archive that takes images of Palestinians and Palestinians themselves enrich print and symbolic capitalism in order to affirm Palestinian identity discourse.

التخصصات الرئيسية

التاريخ و الأثار

عدد الصفحات

237

قائمة المحتويات

• APA
• MLA
• AMA

لغة النص

العربية

نوع البيانات

رسائل جامعية

رقم السجل

BIM-1413057