The Palestinian-Israeli Conflict in History, Literature, Film

An examination of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict through the lens of cultural production. The course will explore the history of the conflict, from the 1947 partition of Palestine to the second Intifada in 2005, through major literary works and films juxtaposed with cultural and historical texts. We will discuss the way that literature and film provide us with humanistic and counterhegemonic narratives, interrogating issues such as nationalism, ethnicity, gender, colonialism, collective trauma and cultural resistance. Exploring the tension between historic and aesthetic production, we will look at how literary and cinematic works challenge, re-imagine and supplement political accounts of the conflict.