UC Santa Cruz

My dissertation, Geographies of Settler Innocence: Atlas of Decolonization, argues that Palestinian filmmakers and media artists have developed a visual language that subverts Israel’s geographies of settler innocence. I theorize settler innocence as a discursive strategy that disappears signs of Indigenous displacement from the dominant visual field to examine how Israel, a settler colonial state established in Palestine through the violent dispossession of Indigenous Palestinians, renders itself an innocent victim of Palestinian aggression. I demonstrate that in response to Israel’s use of innocence as an organizing principle of spatial and cultural production, Palestinian media artists and filmmakers disrupt the reproduction of settler innocence by making visible the infrastructure of oppression that settler states deliberately conceal.