Postspatial, Postcolonial

Abstract

This article centers two new media projects that imagine Palestinian decolonization, given the occupation of Palestinian land: news site Al Jazeera English’s 360-degree video tour of al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem and Palestinian grassroots organization Udna’s three-dimensional rendering of destroyed village Mi’ar. These digital texts reimagine Palestinian access to land as a community-driven and intergenerational project. In this analysis, access is formulated as a term that invokes the following: new-media analyses of the digital divide (or differential resources for obtaining new media across lines of race, nation, gender, etc.); disability studies’ notions of access as intimately tied to political power and infrastructure; and postcolonial studies’ criticisms of colonial access in tourism and resource extraction of the global South. The article brings together these discursive nodes to formulate an understanding of space that imagines decolonial futurity. This future-oriented political practice works toward a vision of Palestine determined by Palestinians, as opposed to limiting pragmatic wars of maneuver. This inquiry therefore is centrally concerned with the ways activists for Palestine employ immersive digital media to formulate and work toward an attachment to decolonial futurity that is both practical and utopian.