Visuality and Violence: Touring the Occupied West Bank. Issue 4 (5th July 2021)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Yang, Connie
• Is Part Of: Geopolitics. Volume 26:Issue 4(2021)
• Page Start: 1175
• Page End: 1195
• Publication Date: 2021-07-05
• Subjects: Geopolitics -- Periodicals; Boundary disputes -- Periodicals; Sovereignty -- Periodicals; 320
• DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2019.1656609
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1465-0045

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This paper explores how processes of visuality produce geopolitical imaginaries of the West Bank in the everyday register. Drawing on the visual geopolitics literature, I turn to a grounded approach of ethnographic observation to consider how the West Bank is framed for international tourists. I trace two guided tours of the West Bank with attention to the differences in the visual, discursive, and embodied practices that constitute their scopic regimes. By analysing the sights tourists are allowed to see or made to see, I illuminate the geopolitical implications of how the West Bank is framed: the scopic regime of mainstream tourism normalises the Israeli military occupation by obscuring its violence, while the critical gaze of alternative tourism seeks to challenge it by foregrounding its violence. The juxtaposition ultimately reveals the complicity of both types in sustaining the asymmetrical logics of occupation.