Report-Back

Summary

The genre of solidarity tourism literature analyzed in Chapter 1 of Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine: accounts written by delegates and tourists after trips to Palestine, in which witnessing functions as an alibi for research and the narrator’s conversion — from disbelief, and from seeing Palestinians as statistics, to seeing them as human — does the persuasive work (Invited to Witness — Solidarity Tourism across Occupied Palestine, PDF p.39, 43, 52-53).

Its two recurring tropes in Kelly’s reading: “I didn’t believe it until I saw it”, and the narration of time in Palestine as rendering concrete and human what had previously been abstract; both privilege witnessing over research and let the tourist stand in as default expert (PDF p.43, 48-50).
Early exemplary text: Sherna Berger Gluck’s An American Feminist in Palestine: The Intifada Years (1994) (PDF p.40); other instances read in part 1 include G. Roger Denson’s and Deborah Willis’s contributions to Occupation and Resistance: American Impressions of the Intifada and a February 1988 Physicians for Human Rights delegation report from Gaza (PDF p.53-54).
Kelly’s verdict on the genre, held in both directions: it is an uneasy, reluctantly employed strategy that knowingly deploys and relies upon the racism it critiques, intervening in narratives that justify occupation while recycling tropes that invalidate any retelling not paired with witnessing; wholesale critique of it would undercut guides’ and hosts’ labor, and obscuring its hierarchies would undermine solidarity work (PDF p.52-53).
In part 2, report-backs also take the shape of lectures, articles, op-eds, performance pieces, song lyrics and art installations; the Alternative Museum’s Occupation and Resistance exhibition (New York, summer 1990) and the Break the Silence Mural Project are read as report-backs in cultural form (PDF p.68-73).

tags
aliases	report-back genre