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Understanding imagination as a performative political action, and therefore as an action that requires training, is at the centre of this paper. Bridging Memory is an activist intervention in which body-sized photographs of Palestinian refugees living today in a refugee camp in South Lebanon were posted by Israeli activists in the place from which they were expelled. The analysis of the project demonstrates the centrality of memory and activism in training a political imagination in Israel/Palestine. Furthermore, this case study illustrates how expanding the limits of the imagination through photography, articulating the 'right of return' as part of 'the right to have rights' can help Israeli Jews visualise the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The village of Miska is one of the 530 Palestinian localities destroyed during the Palestinian Nakba (Arabic for great calamity, catastrophe, or devastation). Although the ruins of these places are part of the Israeli landscape, and most Israeli Jews have some knowledge about the Nakba, they do not understand its meaning. In this paper, I deploy Hannah Arendt's distinction between knowing and understanding to answer the question of how the Nakba can at once be known but not understood by Israeli Jews. Drawing on the tours conducted by the activist organization Zochrot (Hebrew for 'we remember') to the ruins of Miska, I argue that the embodied and symbolic practices conducted during the tours to Miska can work to challenge the gap between knowing and understanding by creating a different perspective on the Nakba. From this perspective, the Nakba is not only understood as the memory of the 'other'—that is, the Palestinian memory of the place—but is understood as a complex memory that embodies a dialectical relationship between Jewish and Palestinian remembrances: a potentially common memory of the place and the basis for the imagining of a common future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term "empty photographs" into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as "'bad,' 'boring,' or repetitious" in post-apartheid settings ("The Uneven Citizenry," 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg's images of Themba Dlamini's funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the "necropolitics" of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics"). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay's notion of the "civil gaze" (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the centre of this article is iNakba, a digital navigational application created by a Tel Aviv-based NGO in 2014. The app superimposes a layer of ruined Palestinian localities destroyed following the 1948 war, on top of the established and hegemonic Israeli geographical representation. At the end of this war and with the formation of the State of Israel, the presence of these localities was eradicated from both the territory and Israeli maps. The iNakba app uses Google maps and Waze as platforms for allowing users to find these localities and navigate towards them in order to increase knowledge about the repressed geographical past of the territory and bring about a political change. By examining iNakba from a media practice perspective, and by comparing it to a printed map published almost seven decades earlier and in very different circumstances, we highlight the unique role of layers in constructing and deconstructing cartographical knowledge. Layers, we argue, allow new potentialities for the representation and imagination of space, specifically, problematizing the eradication of Palestinian localities from the map and suggesting to re-imagine the territory as comprising the two histories and the two peoples. More broadly, the article suggests to understand layers as both a technical and political device. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]