Salah Hassan
Before/After Palestine
In this essay, I discuss different collections of photos of Palestine: 1) US photojournalism of Palestine in the 1946-1956 period; 2) Walid Khalidi photo history Before Their Diaspora, which documents pre-1948 Palestine; 3) Edward Said book in collaboration with photographer Jean Mohr After the Last Sky, which presents a vibrant portrait of Palestinian life under occupation and in exile during the late 1970s and early 1980s; and 4) photos of Gaza (before/after Oct 7). Through a reading of published photos of Palestine, I explore distinct before/after moments in Middle Eastern history: before and after the 1948 partition, before and after 1967, and before and after October 7. The structure of the paper uses the before/after photography motif to explore the history of Palestinian presence and the acts of colonial erasure resulting from wars of conquest, military occupation, and Zionist settlement. The paper concludes with analysis of the images of Gaza before and after October 7, which provide real time representations of an unfolding dystopian future. The paper suggests that the classic before-and-after photographic technique serves in this context as a decolonial representational strategy that aims to affirm Palestinian presence in the face of ongoing efforts at erasure.
Biography
Salah D. Hassan is a professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University and is currently the Director of the Global Studies in the Arts and Humanities Program. His work focuses on anticolonialism, literatures of empire, and Arab North American culture. Hassan’s recent research addresses images of Arabs and Muslims in the media and the modes of Muslim and Arab self-representation. He recently published a book titled Portraits of Sam Hallick: Modern Arab Presence in 20th century North America (Embassy Cultural House 2023). He is also the producer of two documentary films: Migrations of Islam (http://migrationsofislam.org/) and Death of an Imam (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1905039/).
