Afterword Available to Purchase

Loss and recovery; melancholia and redemption: these have been the main pulls of engagement with Palestinian archives. But in the space opened between nostalgia and the desire to recover, other, more ambiguous and less redemptive archival imagination sprouts. The films and works engaged with throughout the book, including several new examples in the Afterword, teach us that we must move beyond the investment in saving the past (from being forever lost) and learn to read and engage the present itself as an archive: a set of testimonies of a possible future and a possible becoming. The book is a call to replace the historical fixation on what was with an investment in imagination and the power to envision and speculate what may still be. Palestine today is an archive of colonial violence, but it is also an opportunity to imagine a radically different reality.