Archiving Gaza in the Present: Memory, Culture and Erasure by Dina Matar and Venetia Porter

The book is a collection of essays, reflections, and academic articles on the diverse cultural and political practices emerging within and despite the genocide on Gaza. The book addresses these practices as both existential and productive and as together producing what we call a living archive of Gaza and its people. We use “archiving Gaza in the present” to provoke critical thinking about perceived knowledges and understanding of archives and archival practices, often discussed as of the past. In using the concept of archiving in the present, we address archives as continuous practices of reaffirmation, presence, memory-making, living, and, of course, resilience that link the past to the present and the present to the past. Together, the diverse contributions are interdisciplinary and varied in style and approach, but specifically speak to the fields of Palestine studies, visual cultures, art, literature, media, history, memory studies, politics, and war studies. These fields are often discussed separately, but this book shows their interconnectedness particularly in moments of incredible violence and destruction as we have seen in Gaza during the genocide.