Reaching for the far-fetched : future-telling in contemporary Palestinian and Israeli literature and art

Both Israeli and Palestinian cultures have been greatly engaged with their past catastrophes and their present realities. The future, on the other hand, received little aesthetic attention in each of these cultures until recently. My dissertation draws attention to an unprecedented phenomenon of the past twenty years: the ostensible proliferation of speculative art and fiction in both Israeli and Palestinian cultures. I ask: Why should this newly emergent interest in the future happen now, and across national and generic divides? Critics and theorists—such as François Hartog, Fredric Jameson, Has Ulrich Gumbrecht, and Vered Karti Shemtov—have generally defined 'the contemporary' in contradistiction to modern teleogies of progress and utopia, whether as an everlasting present, or as an epoch of impasses and close horizons. I intervene in this discourse by emphasizing the increasing prominence of imagined futures, particularly in a political context that would seem to preclude their very viability. As such, this study contributes to the recent history of Palestinian and Israeli literature and art, highlighting how the past twenty years have inaugurated this temporal re-orientation. Decisively departing from both cultural canons, what I call the 'speculative turn' thus expands our critical understanding of today's temporality. Reaching for the Far-Fetched shows that these formulations of the future are unique in deliberately staging the improbable, distinguished from the scarse, pre-contemporary imaginations of the future in Palestinian and Israeli cultural canons. Through their very improbability, I argue, these imagined futures become literary 'speech acts' and artistic 'image acts' that aim not to reflect their reality but to remake it, calling into being hitherto unthought-of political possibilities. In the face of a stagnant political reality, the region's art and literature assume, somewhat ironically, the admonitory and revolutionary role of the seer, whose words are meant to mobilize. In this sense, this dissertation is also a study in the ways literature and art are an exercise in political agency, bringing the far-fetched within reach. Reaching for the Far-Fetched should also be read as an extensive meditation on the ethical ramifications of juxtaposing conflicted cultures, locked together by their imbalanced power dynamics. I offer a new perspective on comparing cultures whose future horizons are inevitably, and unequally, constrained. Rather than eliciting a sense of conectivity by focusing on historical meeting-points or cultural border-crossings, I foreground the minute ways in which each culture maintains separate frames of reference, often unbeknownst to the other culture. This research thus sets aside a model of mutual influence in favor of inquiring the simultaneous emergence of common tropes in disconnected cultural contexts. The dissertation examines the speculative turn through three such tropes—exile, return, and land—and three corresponding types of futurity. I first show how imagining a future departure from the homeland is haunted by visions of imminent collapse and the recurrence of calamitous pasts, a form of retrograde futurity. I then turn to the trope of return to the homeland, characterized by weak futurity, in which a clear, sustainable vision of imaginable repatriation remains out of reach. Finally, I use the concept of spatial futurity to explore speculative mappings and redivisions of the land of Israel/Palestine. Tested against real-world political absurdities and breaching cultural conventions, this burst of far-fetched speculations strives to transform present reality by turning our gaze to far-fetched futures

Keywords: Comparative Literature.
Advisor: Eshel Amir 
Diab Ahmad
Gumbrecht Hans Ulrich
Palumbo-Liu David
Shemtov Vered Karti