W&M Featured Events

Location

Boswell Hall (formerly Morton Hall), Room 220
100 Ukrop Way
Williamsburg, VA 23185Map this location

Gil Hochberg, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at UCLA, will discuss how the Israeli Occupation of Palestine is driven by the unequal access to visual rights, or the right to control what can be seen, how, and from which position. Israel maintains this unequal balance by erasing the history and denying the existence of Palestinians, and by carefully concealing its own militarization. Israeli surveillance of Palestinians, combined with the militarized gaze of Israeli soldiers at places like roadside checkpoints, also serve as tools of dominance. She will discuss an array of films, art, and photography that challenge the inequity of visual rights by altering, queering, and manipulating dominant modes of representing the conflict.These artistic creations, she shows, offers a new ways of seeing - such as the refusal of Palestinian filmmakers and photographers to show Palestinian suffering or the Israeli artists' exposure of state manipulated Israeli blindness offers a crucial gateway for overcoming and undoing Israel's militarized dominance and political oppression of Palestinians.

Contact

[[spsheehi, Stephen Sheehi]]