On Barking Dogs and a Natural History of Destruction – Heidi Grunebaum

In the afterlives of annihilatory violence in Palestine/Israel where the traces of complete destruction of ecosystems and infrastructures of life are recursively erased, itineraries of apprehension often rely on survivors’ accounts to make sense of the ongoing Nakba. In enumerating the afterlives of the Nakba in a time of renewed war and genocide in Gaza, this paper explores itineraries of sensorial disturbance which puncture the flattening, smooth perspectives of narratives that mimetically reproduce the “aerial perspectives” of remote warfare and digital technologies. It approaches historical, technological, and environmental entanglements of a “natural history of destruction” (W.G. Sebald) by thinking with aesthetic itineraries opened by Adania Shibli’s novel Minor Detail. The novel’s partitioned structure disrupts the naturalisation of destruction through the acoustic haunting of barking dogs across both sections of the text; as does its focus on minute details perceptible in textual fragments, topographic clues, mnemonic traces and aesthetic atmospheres. Read together with a recent investigative report on the deadly use of commercial drones in Gaza by Yuval Abraham and with self-recorded videos of Gazan music teacher, Ahmed Abu Amsha’s low frequency singing, the imbrication of multiple scales of time and space in the erasures and repressions of destruction are threaded through an aesthetic itinerary of sensorial disturbance to ask what this might mean for a political imagination for the future of Palestine/Israel. 

Heidi Grunebaum is the immediate former director of the Centre for Humanities Research, University of the Western Cape (UWC), where she works on the research theme ‘Aesthetics and Politics’. Grunebaum is author of the monograph, Memorializing the Past: Everyday Life in South Africa after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (New Jersey, Transaction, 2011) co-editor, with Emile Maurice, of Uncontained: Opening the Community Arts Project Archive (Cape Town, CHR, 2012) and Athlone in Mind (Cape Town, CHR, 2017) with curator, Kurt Campbell. Mark J. Kaplan and Grunebaum made two feature length documentary films: The Village Under the Forest (2013) and The Return (2024). Grunebaum’s work focuses on cultural production and social responses to genocide, war and mass violence, specifically in relation to the Holocaust, apartheid and the Palestinian Nakba.