Bereft of nature: renegotiating national identity in the films of Rashid Masharawi

Abstract

This essay examines Rashid Masharawi’s transnationally produced films against the backdrop of problematizing the Palestinian relationship with the realm of nature. Grounded in the idea of minor transnationalism, modelled by Françoise Lionnet and Shu-mei Shih, drawing upon the conceptualization of ‘minor literatures’ of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and the transnational film theory of Mette Hjort, it focuses on Masharawi’s feature films, Curfew, Haïfa, Ticket to Jerusalem, Laila’s Birthday and Palestine Stereo. Set in and around refugee camps in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, Masharawi’s ‘minor films’ accentuate the absence of nature from the lives of local individuals and communities, and their disconnections from the realms of natural transcendence. Masharawi affirms his position on cinema as a vehicle for the advancement of modernity, but does not negate or marginalize the ties of Palestinians to their land. Urging his audiences to contemplate the tropes in the national imaginary and the discontinuities from the romanticized narratives of land in the pre-Nakba period, he seeks what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the ‘collective paradigms of political enunciation,’ corresponding to the new modes of subjectivity.

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