‘Ecocinema, Environmentalism and the Arts of Palestine Solidarity’

Guest lecture by Dr Hannah Boast (University of Edinburgh)

Adam Smith Business School Room 489

Weds 23 October 4.00 to 5.30pm

Followed by drinks in Adam Smith Business School Atrium

In this talk I examine and contextualise a contemporary environmental turn in Palestinian arts, culture and politics by way of a discussion of Jumana Manna’s Foragers (al-yad al-khadra, 2022), an understated documentary that has been widely screened in the wake of Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza. I argue that environmentalism, mediated in particular through food, has become an increasingly important frame through which Palestinians and their supporters narrate the idea of Palestine and the Palestinian struggle to metropolitan audiences. Environmentalism has, I suggest, become a key emerging mode through which identification and solidarity with the Palestinian cause is solicited and received, positioned as a counterpoint to Israeli narratives of environmental restoration and making the desert bloom. Manna’s film, which combines tropes of ecocinema with older modes of representing nature from Palestinian literature and culture, offers both an important lens on arts and ecology in Palestine, and a valuable perspective on key topics in the Environmental Humanities, including Indigeneity, posthumanism and multispecies justice.