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Poetry on Trial: Translation, Law and Social Media in the Case of Dareen Tatour
Abstract by Liron Mor On Session 010  (New Directions in Modern Arabic Poetry)

On Thursday, November 15 at 5:30 pm

2018 Annual Meeting

Abstract
The paper examines the court case of the State of Israel vs. Dareen Tatour, a Palestinian-Israeli poet who is charged with inciting terror based on a video-poem she posted to Facebook. The entire court case is taking place in and through translation, as both the Arabic poem and the poet's statements are recorded exclusively in Hebrew. By reading the poem, its translations and the court protocols, I show how the court's practice of translation constructs the poet's intention as fully knowable and fixed, and yet, paradoxically, as completely inaccessible on its own terms. After considering new technologies that detect Palestinian "inciters" on social media based on statistics and algorithms, I take on the rising ubiquity of the charge of incitement in Israel, claiming that it is an Israeli translation of Palestinian resistance. Thus, instead of a reaction to a specific historical and political context, Palestinian resistance now appears in Israel as a kind of contagious evil intention that materializes out of thin air and must therefore be controlled bio-politically. I claim that this move marks a shift in the state's approach to Palestinian struggle, one that foregrounds juridical individual intention and erases the historical and social conditions in which resistance is embedded.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Other
Sub Area
None