Israeli Visual Politics and Digital Archives in a Time of Genocide

Lecture with Rebecca L. Stein (Duke University).

This talk queries the terms of perpetrator visuality - defined as ways of seeing and visual practices that are employed by Israelis and their supporters to bolster and advance the genocidal campaign on Gaza. Alongside these ways of seeing are associated digital archives. These twin categories - perpetrator visuality, and the accompanying digital archives - are large and internally differentiated. Visual strategies include everything from erasure - such as banishing Palestinian victims from the Israeli mainstream visual frame - to the visual coding of all images of Palestinians as terrorists and would-be targets. The associated perpetrator’s archive includes everything from the social media accounts of Israeli soldiers to the bodies of so-called image evidence that have been marshaled by the state to support the military assault. This talk will consider the highly variable political semiotics and functions of the perpetrator’s digital archive - at once employed to bolster the state’s genocidal project and increasingly as a legal tool to contest it.

Bio

Professor Rebecca Stein is a cultural anthropologist and visual studies scholar researching cultural politics in Israel/Palestine in the context of the Israeli military occupation and legacy of the Palestinian dispossession.  She is the author and/or editor of five books in the field of anti-colonial Israel/Palestine studies.

Her latest book, Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine, is the culmination of a multi-book project about the ways that new media and communication technologies are recalibrating the Israeli relationship to its military occupation.