Communing with Darwish's ghosts: absent presence in dialogue with the Palestinian moving image

Ball, A ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2185-629X, 2014. Communing with Darwish's ghosts: absent presence in dialogue with the Palestinian moving image. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication, 7 (2), pp. 135-151. ISSN 1873-9857

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Abstract

In his prose-poem Absent Presence (published in English translation in 2010), the revered Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish identified a source of tension that resonates through much Palestinian creative expression: a tension not between Arab and Jew, nor between Israeli and Palestinian but between presence and absence. Drawing on the many motifs of presence and absence, and by extension, of visibility and invisibility, spectrality and haunting that surface within Absent Presence, this article seeks to translate Darwish’s poetic meditations into a visual context by placing his work in dialogue with two pieces of Palestinian video art, Sharif Waked’s To Be Continued… (2009) and Wafaa Yasin’s The Imaginary Houses of Palestine (2010), which share Darwish’s preoccupation with ideas of the spectral, and of present-day Palestine’s complex relationship with its past. Mobilising a range of critical concepts including Abu-Lughod’s theorisations of ‘postmemory’ and Derrida’s notion of ‘the spectral’, this article explores the ways in which various forms of absence arising from Palestine’s fraught national history continue to haunt contemporary Palestinian video art, while arguing that the presence of the ‘spectral’ within such works also reveals a vibrant creative present in motion.

Item Type:	Journal article
Publication Title:	Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication
Creators:	Ball, A.
Publisher:	Koninklijke Brill NV
Date:	2014
Volume:	7
Number:	2
ISSN:	1873-9857
Identifiers:	Number Type 10.1163/18739865-00702003 DOI
Divisions:	Schools > School of Arts and Humanities
Record created by:	Jill Tomkinson
Date Added:	14 Sep 2016 15:25
Last Modified:	24 Jan 2018 15:55
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/28531

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