Archiving Gaza in the present: The quest to preserve Palestinian memory
Archiving Gaza in the Present – Book Cover
Dina Matar writes in Middle East Eye on 25 December 2025:
What does “archiving Gaza in the present” – the title of a book I recently co-edited with former curator of Islamic and contemporary Middle Eastern art Venetia Porter – mean amid the live-streamed and still-unfolding genocide of Palestinians in Gaza?
And how do we address this labour as a productive process, without falling into arguments promoted by colonial knowledge institutions, which are incessantly asking who has the right to archive or what should be archived?
In Archiving Gaza in the Present, I approach these questions as someone who began her career as a journalist before moving on to academia – and thus someone who has long been involved in storytelling and recording history as it develops.
I also write as a Palestinian scholar based in the West, which means that my practices remain to a certain extent bounded by, and assessed through, colonial and racist approaches to what indigenous and non-white people, foremost Palestinians, can produce.
Colonialism, race and paternalism all inform how Global South populations are allowed to narrate, imagine and think about themselves. And there is no doubt that Palestinians, in particular, face censure and excessive scrutiny – sometimes incredulity – even as they write about themselves.