| "Resilient Resistance: Colonial Biblical, Archaeological and Ethnographical Imaginaries in the Work of Chalil Raad (Khalīl Raʿd), 1891–1948." Imaging and Imagining Palestine, edited by Karène Sanchez Summerer and Sary Zananiri. The Netherlands: Brill, 2021, 185-226. | | | Chalil Raad (Khalil Ra'd) was one of the most important Arab photographers in the Middle East, beginning in the late nineteenth century, and one of the first – if not the first – active in Palestine. Though born in Lebanon, Raad lived in Palestine for seven decades, was professionally active, mainly in it, for six, and created a significant and impressive oeuvre. He photographed the everyday life of the locals, mainly indigenous Palestinian urban and rural landscapes, social/family scenes, and portraits in the studio or in the public sphere, in a staged, semi-staged or documentary manner, for commercial andother purposes. He was also active in military and ethnographic photography and was apparently the first Arab and local archaeological photographer in Palestine. Simultaneously, he travelled around the Middle East, giving expression to Arab life in a period of reorganisation and reform, the Tanzimat (the massive restructuring of the Ottoman Empire) and al-Nahda (awakening or renaissance), reflecting ‘the afterimage of modernity.’
From the nineteenth century onwards, the Palestinian presence in the region was concealed or misrepresented by colonialist representations and ‘seizure of narratives’, a process of elimination from Westerner’s and Zionist’s consciousness. Furthermore, since 1930s, and especially since the Nakba (1948), Palestinian archives and material were seized or looted by Jewish and Israeli forces and individuals and deleted from the public sphere by the Israeli colonial regime of knowledge by additional means. Other resources were lost or damaged and subsequent wars between Israel and Arab states and the Palestinians. While Palestinians are still fighting to regain their missing archivesand collect fragments from their past, fighting against ‘archival absence’ (evidence or materials)18 and write their ‘history without documents’, Raad’s archive reveals the very destructiveness of colonialism. At the same time, it enables us to shed light on ‘archival imaginaries … archives both shadow and real, and conditions both intellectual and material’. | | | | Download the Article | | |
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