Tantura, Memory &
Narrative Contestation

PS140O: Projecting Power

Prof Wasow

2025-04-22

Movie poll

bit.ly/pp25film13

Final Projects

How to Write a Successful Paper

• Good puzzle
  • Something that matters
  • Unexplained variation
• Engage with prior theory
  • Join the conversation
  • Test a theory that travels
• Be clear, be forthright
  • Aim for a causal story
  • Discuss limitations

What do you mean unexplained variation?

Puzzle? Politics of Sin, Meier (1994)

Dangerous drugs legal, far less deadly drugs illegal

Dangerous drugs legal, far less deadly drugs illegal

What does it mean to engage with prior theory?

With Whom Are You in Conversation?

With Whom Are You in Conversation?

With Whom Are You in Conversation?

They Say, I Say

• The single most important template that we focus on in this book is the “they say _______; I say _______” formula that gives our book its title. If there is any one point that we hope you will take away from this book, it is the importance not only of expressing your ideas (“I say”) but of presenting those ideas as a response to some other person or group (“they say”).

What does it mean to engage with prior theory?

How does this apply to video essays?

Social Science Templates

• Political science theory tested against evidence including one or more films
  • Example:
    • They say: Tilly (1985) argues that state formation is often better understood as a form of protection racket or organized crime.
    • I say _________ drawing on evidence from The Act of Killing, and Manda Bala.

Social Science Templates

• ‘Contest of theories’ vs evidence including one or more films

  • They Say: Chenoweth & Stephan (2008) find nonviolent protest is more effective than violent protest. By contrast, Enos, Kaufman & Sands (2018), in “Can Violent Protest Change Local Policy Support?,” find the 1992 LA Riot might have had a liberalizing effect on voters.

  • I say __________ about the effectiveness of violent resistance drawing on both historical evidence and specific scenes from the The Battle of Algiers.

Representation Template

• How is a particular group represented or misrepresented in a film or set of films?
  • How is a particular film reinforcing or breaking with stereotypes, for example by offering counter-stereotypic portrayals?
  • How is a particular film evoking past representations and/or pushing for different kinds of images and characters?
  • Would still require engagement with readings

Craft Template

• Close reading of scenes in a film (or films) in relation to core themes of the class
• Example:
  • A central question in political science is how do the few control the many? In 12 Years a Slave, specific elements of the score are used to convey authority to audiences. I draw on Sidanius & Pratto’s idea of legitimizing myths to examine how power is conveyed through music, non-diagetic sound, and other specific elements of the score.

Questions?

Quiz

Tantura, Memory, Contested Narratives

• Teddy Katz’s MA thesis (1998): Documentation of alleged massacre at Tantura
• Academic and legal challenges to Katz’s research
• The film revisits testimonies and raises questions about:
  • Historical memory
  • Academic freedom
  • National identity construction

Narrative and Memory in Political Science

Patterson & Monroe explain:

“Narratives are important in providing both individuals and collectives with a sense of purpose and place. The shared stories of a culture provide grounds for common understandings and interpretation.” (p. 321)

When Narratives Conflict

• Tantura represents a classic case of narrative contestation
• Competing stories:
  • What happened in 1948?
  • Who is responsible?
  • How these events should be remembered?

Academic Freedom and Contested History

• Katz’s experience illustrates challenges of researching contested events
• Patterson & Monroe note how narratives can become “sites of cultural conflict when those common understandings are challenged” (p. 321)
• Academic inquiry becomes politicized when it challenges foundational national narratives

Discussion: How does Katz’s experience illuminate the risks of challenging dominant narratives?

Let’s hear from: Andrew, Luci, Ying, Lanah

Creating Narratives to Assuage Past Injustices

According to Patterson & Monroe:

“The political importance of commonly shared narratives means they often become the focus of political debate.” (p. 322)

• Foundational Israeli narrative: Independence and survival
• Counter-narrative in Tantura: Displacement and violence
• Both narratives serve psychological and political functions

Patterson & Monroe

• “Narratives are important in providing both individuals and collectives with a sense of purpose and place. The shared stories of a culture provide grounds for common understandings and interpretation. But as such, they may become sites of cultural conflict when those common understandings are challenged.”

Patterson & Monroe

• “Nowhere is this more starkly and politically demonstrated than in narratives of national identity. Stories about the origin and development of a nation provide a shared sense of who we are, where we came from, and how we fit together. These narratives permeate culture and are essential to any kind of collective functioning.”

Discussion: Why do you think national identity is so often built around shared narratives?

Let’s hear from: Dillon, Qing, Erika, Madeleine

Perils of Interpretation

• “Scott points out that there are two levels of interpretation involved in making sense of experience. One, as suggested above, is an explanation of what makes that experience possible. The other level of interpretation is built into the very act of experiencing itself. An experience is not an unmediated interaction with the world, imprinting itself clearly and directly in the brain of the experiencing person.

Perils of Interpretation

• “Rather, part of any experience is itself an interpretation, a recognition that something happened and the construction of a theory about what that something was. “Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political”

Discussion: Can you think of a time when your interpretation of an experience changed significantly?

Let’s hear from: Nadia, Gretchen, Crystal, Liz

Why Historical Narratives Diverge

Herrera & Kydd identify key reasons:

1. “Narratives may be associated with identity groups” (p. 1175)
2. “Interpretations of the past may be strategic” (p. 1175)
3. Divergent perceptions about what actually occurred

The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict and Divergent Narratives

Herrera & Kydd note:

“Disputed narratives of the past are a central feature of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.” (p. 1175)

• Tantura exemplifies how these divergent narratives operate within Israeli society itself
• Memory becomes a battleground for national identity

Strategies for Dealing with Conflicting Memories

Approaches seen in Tantura and academic literature:

1. Demand for acknowledgment (Katz’s approach)
2. Suppression of counter-narratives (Legal challenges, academic pressure)
3. “Don’t Look Back in Anger” (one of Herrera & Kydd’s models for moving forward)

Memory Contestation in Post-Conflict Societies

• Tantura raises questions about how societies handle difficult pasts
• Patterson & Monroe: “The experience itself does not explain anything; rather, the experience itself is what requires explanation.” (p. 328)
• Film demonstrates how unresolved historical interpretations continue to shape present realities

The “Pacto de Olvido” Approach

• Herrera & Kydd reference Spain’s “pact of forgetting” post-Franco (p. 1176)
• Question: Does silence or forgetting work?
• Tantura suggests suppressed memories eventually resurface
• Tensions between reconciliation and historical truth

Academic Research as Intervention

• Katz’s thesis wasn’t just documenting history—it was intervening in memory politics
• Academic freedom issues:
  • Whose stories can be told?
  • Who can tell them?
  • What methodologies are accepted?

“The Project of Making Experience Visible”

Patterson & Monroe caution:

“The project of making experience visible precludes analysis of the workings of this system and of its historicity; instead, it reproduces its terms.” (p. 328)

• Tantura attempts to make visible experiences erased from official narratives
• But this visibility itself becomes contested

Cooperation Despite Divergent Narratives?

Herrera & Kydd suggest:

“The question remains, how is cooperation best resumed in the face of diverging narratives about the past?” (p. 1176)

• Is acknowledgment necessary for reconciliation?
• Can societies move forward without agreement about the past?

Video Essay

Memory, Narrative and National Identity

Alon Schwarz Interview

• “The movie is I see it, and as I meant it to be, it’s not only about the story of the village of Tantura and the massacre that happened there, or what happened to Teddy Katz. The movie also is a portrait of a society, a portrait of Israeli society, but it could be a portrait of any society that whitewashes its past and doesn’t want to look into the darker periods of its past.

— Interview with Alon Schwarz, From Tel Aviv Review, Nov 21, 2022

Alon Schwarz Interview

• “And it’s how memory is sculpted and how people look away from what they really don’t want to remember. That’s how I define the movie. And the case of Tantura is discussed in this movie, of course.”

Alon Schwarz Interview

• “But the wider picture in the movie is about the Nakba, the Palestinian catastrophe, the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian population from the territories that are Israel today, the 1948 borders, and about a society that doesn’t want to look into its past.”

Alon Schwarz Interview

“The question is not if there was or wasn’t a massacre.

That’s pretty obvious.

The question is to look at how memory is sculpted, to understand how narratives are protected, to understand how a nation… And this is not only true for Israel.

Alon Schwarz Interview

It’s true for America with the Indians. It’s true for Australia with the Aboriginal people. Almost every nation that starts, certainly in the colonial period, massacred local population and took them off the land.”

Discussion: How is Tantura relevant to current debates in the U.S.?

Let’s hear from: Derya, Amy, Yuning, Brynn

Adi Zulkadry in The Act of Killing

Questions?