[Commlist] new book: Screen Shots

We would like to announce a new publication from Stanford University 
Press, which we hope will be of interest.

*Screen Shots***

State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine

*Rebecca L. Stein***

*_https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503628021/screen-shots/ 
<https://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/9781503628021/screen-shots/> _*

*__*

*Receive a 20% discount online*:*

*CSLS2021*

*Valid until 11:59 GMT, 31st December 2021. Discount only applies to the 
CAP website

“Since its invention, photography has changed the way people see, and 
represent, themselves and others. Digital photography in the early 21st 
century has had an even more profound impact not only on how a conflict, 
like the one in Palestine, is seen and presented, but also on the 
political discourse and its visual articulation by the participants 
themselves. Rebecca L. Stein’s /Screen Shots/is the first book to 
examine how digital photography impacted everyday practice under 
military occupation. It constitutes a very important addition to the 
fields of Palestine, postcolonial, and visual studies. The book 
functions both as a chronicle of photographed social life, as well as 
the political function of the photography. It is a must-read for anyone 
interested in Palestine.”*—Issam Nassar, Illinois State University*

“Videos of human rights violations are a new form of testimony that 
require deep attentiveness to the multiple ways that politics are 
inscribed in images. In /Screen Shots/, Rebecca L. Stein’s literary 
sensitivity to technology, media, and law inhabits the multi-dimensional 
space opened up by these images.”*—Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture, 
Goldsmiths, University of London*

“In Palestine perhaps more than anywhere else, political struggle has 
hinged in recent years on video technology’s promise of a perfect 
witnessing: the fantasy that oppression can be recorded with such 
absolute transparency that it will compel viewers to act. Writing with 
great clarity and unflinching rigor, Rebecca L. Stein focuses on the 
inevitable failures of this dream and the emergence of the visual as yet 
another painfully contested battlefield. /Screen Shots/is an elegant, 
sobering work, and should be required reading for anyone interested in 
cutting through the colonialist myths that obscure the brutal realities 
of the occupation—and that still set the terms of its media 
representation.”*—Ben Ehrenreich, author of **/The Way to the Spring: 
Life and Death in Palestine /*//

“/Screen Shots/teaches as it describes, instructs as it unsettles what 
we know about the expanse and limits of digital photography in the 
civilian landscapes of perpetual war, of photographic encounters with 
Israel state violence in the occupied Palestinian territories over the 
last two decades. Avoiding a predictable rehearsal of digital 
photography as a versatile and effective weapon of war, /Screen 
Shots/strikes precisely and pointedly elsewhere: at the political nerve 
of visualized failures, at the unnerving state of faulty images and 
unsteady cameras not properly loaded, apertures not set for the scale of 
violence confronted, witnessing that misses its mark. /Screen 
Shots/makes evident what aperture settings can’t tell: how the images 
captured at once buttress and undermine claims of brutalizing settlers, 
humanitarian NGOs, and Palestinian activists—depending on what sits 
resolutely askew or adjacent to the photographer’s lens. In this war of 
images, none of those tasked with recording can wholly control how 
violence will be applauded or vilified, how perpetrators will be cast, 
and how those images and their self-proclaimed heroes will be 
politically framed. In the end, Rebecca L. Stein’s lucid account both 
acknowledges and defies the grotesque features of this infamously ugly 
military occupation.”*—Ann Stoler, The New School for Social Research *

In the last two decades, amid the global spread of smartphones, state 
killings of civilians have increasingly been captured on the cameras of 
both bystanders and police. /Screen Shots/studies this phenomenon from 
the vantage point of the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories. 
Here, cameras have proliferated as political tools in the hands of a 
broad range of actors and institutions, including Palestinian activists, 
Israeli soldiers, Jewish settlers, and human rights workers. All trained 
their lens on Israeli state violence, propelled by a shared dream: that 
advances in digital photography—closer, sharper, faster—would advance 
their respective political agendas. Most would be let down.

Drawing on ethnographic work, Rebecca L. Stein chronicles Palestinian 
video-activists seeking justice, Israeli soldiers laboring to perfect 
the military’s image, and Zionist conspiracy theorists accusing 
Palestinians of “playing dead.” Writing against techno-optimism, Stein 
investigates what camera dreams and disillusionment across these 
political divides reveal about the Israeli and Palestinian colonial 
present, and the shifting terms of power and struggle in the smartphone age.

*Rebecca L. Stein*is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Duke 
University. She is the author of /Digital Militarism: Israel’s 
Occupation in the Social Media Age /(Stanford, 2015, with Adi Kuntsman) 
and /Itineraries in Conflict: Israelis, Palestinians, and the Political 
Lives of Tourism/(2008).



*Stanford University Press**| Stanford Studies in Middle Eastern and 
Islamic Societies and Cultures | June 2021 | 248pp | 9781503628021 | PB 
| £19.99**

*Price subject to change.

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