The future Palestinian present

Palestinian science fiction and the protracted now.

Still from from Larissa Sansour’s “Nation Estate”. Reproduced by kind permission of the artist

This piece was initially published on Mangal Media on August 25th, 2019.

There is a concept coined by the Lebanese writer Walid Sadek which denotes a present endlessly postponed by the lack of pasts and futures. He calls it ‘the protracted now’. Since discovering it in his The Ruin to Come, Essays from a Protracted War, I have been…