'Siyada Asliya Falastiniya' in the Digital Narratives of “PreOccupation Podcast” and “Sbeih.jpg”

Document Type : Original Article

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The British University in Egypt

Abstract

This paper investigates how Bassam Abun-Nadi’s “The PreOccupation: A Not-So-Brief History of Palestine Podcast” and Subhi’s Instagram account: “Sbeih.jpg” decolonize the hegemonic Western and Zionist colonial digital and media narratives. It explores the role of these digital platforms in inscribing resistance strategies to the end of reclaiming Palestinian narrative, agency and mobilizing support for Palestine. Despite both platforms using English as a medium of communication to reach a wider global audience, they employ different digital tools to reach specific audience segments while propagating social media awareness on Palestine. Abun-Nadi’s podcast delves in the history of Palestine before the Zionist colonization through digital storytelling in defiance of the infamous Zionist slogan a “land without a people, for a people without a land”. Conversely, Subhi’s Instagram account, in addition to asserting his dual Palestinian-Filipino identity, foregrounds, documents, and archives the despicable reality of the recent War on Gaza 2023. Subhi’s account is a counter-narrative to the intentionally silenced and misrepresented depictions of the joint Israeli-American colonial-imperialist war as represented in Western and Zionist media outlets. Using decolonization, digital humanities and new media theory as conceptual frameworks, this paper seeks to analyze how far “The PreOccupation” podcast and “Sbeih.jpg” Instagram account resist global Western and Israeli narratives through digitally reinscribing and reclaiming Palestinian narratives.

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