hantoms of a bygone neighborhood life: spectral urbanism between Jaffa and Tel-Aviv

• Published in: Lo squaderno Vol. 17; no. 2; pp. 29 - 32
• Main Authors: Roni Dorot, Daniel Monterescu
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: professionaldreamers 01-07-2022
• ISSN: 1973-9141

29 The social life of ruins This essay stems from a long personal, intellectual, and political fascination with the time of the nation and the time of the city. Speaking of and for the city, however, is a chronicle of foretold failure. As Italo Calvino notes in his Invisible Cities, “The city does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.”We therefore have attempted to read the city and its citizens as a palimpsest of successive owners, subjects, and bystanders. The violently divergent histories of Jaffa, a binational city of contention, cannot be erased from memory and place; rather, they are impregnated in uncanny manners. The return of the repressed springs out with a vengeance from the interstices. However, the voice of the repressed is commonly silenced by hegemonic narratives of self and nation and by identity politics in public discourse and academic scholarship. When heard, this voice is often faint and feeble, cracked and incoherent. In this essay we seek to recoup the incongruities of these narratives and tell the tale of these historical scratches, indentations, and scrolls.