Colonial Calculus of Veracity

Summary

Jennifer Lynn Kelly’s term in Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine for the calculus that positions only tourists and delegates as truth-telling subjects and witnesses to colonial violence in Palestine, while Palestinian narrators of their own displacement are constructed as unreliable and made to require corroboration (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.27, 39-40).

The term gives Chapter 1 its title, “The Colonial Calculus of Veracity: Delegations under Erasure and the Desire for Evidentiary Weight” (PDF p.38).
Its mechanism, as traced through first intifada Report-Back literature: narratives about Palestine/Israel construct Palestinians as unreliable narrators, making international witnesses, “having seen it with their own eyes”, reliable interlocutors able to translate what they witnessed into truths for US audiences; Palestinian accounts are corroborated by human rights agencies and UN officers rather than believed (PDF p.39, 46-47).
Kelly’s formulation of the underlying problem: “the suturing of witnessing to evidence is a central problem of solidarity tourism. What Palestinians confront is not a question of evidence but a question of epistemology” (PDF p.44).
Palestinian hosts on first intifada delegations worked against the calculus — intervening in knowledge produced about Palestine, refusing to perform (only) subjection, and underscoring tourist complicity — and contemporary guides extend invitations only under conditions that do not replicate it (PDF p.27, 40).

tags
aliases