Table Of ContentPost-Millennial Palestine
Literature, Memory, Resistance
Edited by
Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
First published 2021 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © 2021 Liverpool University Press
The right of Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha to be identified as
the editors of this book has been asserted by them in accordance with
the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior
written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-80034-827-1 cased
ISBN 978-1-80034-744-1 epdf
Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
To Lindsey
If not for you, we would never have come together
to create this book
Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Notes on Contributors xi
Foreword: Under ‘Suffering’s Glow’: Palestinian Writing after Oslo 1
By Bashir Abu-Manneh
Introduction 9
By Rachel Gregory Fox and Ahmad Qabaha
Part I: Palestinian Archives: Catastrophe, Exile,
and Life Writing
1 Late Style as Resistance in the Works of Edward Said,
Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti 31
By Tahrir Hamdi
2 A ‘Rich Fabric of Some Sort, Which No One Can
Fully Comprehend [or] Fully Own’: Levantine Remains
in Memoirs by Edward Said, Jean Said Makdisi, and
Wadad Makdisi Cortas 47
By Lindsey Moore
3 The Exile’s Memory and the Chronotope in Ghada
Karmi’s Return: A Palestinian Memoir 67
By Ahmad Qabaha
viii Post-Millennial Palestine
4 Snapshots of Solidarity: Anthologizing Palestinian
Life Writing 83
By Sophia Brown
Part II: Palestinian Aesthetics: Icons, Haptics,
and Palimpsests
5 Confronting the Mythic? Najwan Darwish and
Post-Millennium Palestinian Poetry 103
By Sarah Irving
6 Enduring Palestine: Haptics, Violence, and Affect in
Adania Shibli’s Touch 119
By Michael Pritchard
7 ‘I Can Only Get There Now on the Rafts of Memories’:
Palimpsestic and Genealogical Memories in Susan
Abulhawa’s Novels 135
By Rachel Gregory Fox
Part III: Palestinian Horizons: Endings and Beginnings,
or Taking Flight
8 Killing God to Find Palestine ‘after the End of the
World’ in Adania Shibli, Mahmoud Amer, and Maya
Abu al-Hayyat 155
By Nora Parr
9 Unfinished Work: Anticolonial Pedagogy in Selma
Dabbagh’s Out of It 173
By Tom Sperlinger
10 Wingwomen: Towards a Feminocentric Poetics of
Flight in Twenty-First Century Palestinian Creative
Consciousness 191
By Anna Ball
Works Cited 209
Index 225
Acknowledgements
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the team at Liverpool University Press,
especially Chloe Johnson, for all their support, which has made this
collection possible. We are also grateful to the reviewers who have read
this work across its many stages for seeing its potential, and for their
generous and constructive feedback.
This collection would not be anything without our amazing
contributors. We cannot thank them enough for all the hard work
they have put into developing this book. They have produced what,
we think, amounts to a necessary and critically perceptive interro-
gation of contemporary Palestinian literature. We particularly want
to acknowledge the number of contributors to this collection who are
early career researchers (like ourselves)—their commitment to helping
produce this book, in spite of the precarity that comes from often
last-minute, fixed-term, and/or part-time academic job contracts is
highly appreciated by us and, we hope, our readers.
Thank you to Bashir Abu-Manneh for agreeing to write the
Foreword for this collection. We are grateful to him for his time,
generosity, and enthusiasm towards the project.
Special thanks are also due to Lindsey Moore, to whom this
collection is dedicated. She supervised both of us through the course
of our PhD research, and continues to provide guidance and support
as we take on the next stages of our academic and professional careers.
We are indebted to her for the advice and feedback she has offered on
the production of this collection, from its earliest stage.
Thank you to Zawyeh Gallery for giving us permission to use Nabil
Anani’s Mother’s Embrace as part of the cover of this book. We feel it
ix
x Post-Millennial Palestine
speaks to the themes of the book, invoking Palestinian heritage, cultural
memory, and resilience. We would also like to thank the School of
English and Drama at Queen Mary University of London (QMUL)
for contributing funding towards the purchase of this image.
Rachel Gregory Fox would like to thank her colleagues at Lancaster
University, UK, who have provided her with a supportive work
environment in which to develop this collection as both PhD student
and, later, post-doctoral teaching staff. She is also thankful to her
colleagues at QMUL for their warm welcome to the department in
September 2019, and their kindness and encouragement. Rachel would
also like to thank Ahmad for joining her in this venture—it would
have been impossible to attempt it alone. Rachel is forever grateful to
her mother and brother for their continued love and support. Lastly,
Rachel is thankful to her husband, Alan, who she had the privilege
of marrying while in the process of working on this book.
Ahmad Qabaha would like to thank his colleagues at An-Najah
National University, Palestine, for their encouragement and motivation.
They showed a huge interest in this collaborative work and their
courtesy inspired him to go through this mountainous journey.
Ahmad would also like to reciprocate Rachel with his gratitude;
undoubtedly, Rachel’s commitment and dedication is the cornerstone
of the completion of this project. Lastly, Ahmad feels indebted to his
parents, siblings, wife, and naughty baby for their emotional support
and love, which stimulate his interest in conducting research.
Notes on Contributors
Notes on Contributors
Bashir Abu-Manneh is Reader in Postcolonial Literature at the
University of Kent, and author of The Palestinian Novel: From 1948 to
the Present (2016) and Fiction of the New Statesman, 1913–1939 (2011). He
is also editor of a collection of essays on Edward Said entitled After
Said: Postcolonial Literary Studies in the Twenty-First Century (2018).
Anna Ball is Associate Professor of Postcolonial Feminisms, Literatures,
and Cultures at Nottingham Trent University. She specializes in
women’s writing, film, and art from the contemporary Middle East,
and also works on questions of gender, agency, and representation in
relation to cultures of forced migration. Her monograph, Palestinian
Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective, was published with
Routledge in 2012. With Karim Mattar, she co-edited The Edinburgh
Companion to the Postcolonial Middle East (Edinburgh University Press,
2018) and, following a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2019, she is
shortly to publish her next monograph, Forced Migration in the Feminist
Imagination: Transcultural Movements (Routledge, forthcoming).
Sophia Brown is an Associate Research Fellow in the Department
of English, Theatre, and Creative Writing at Birkbeck, University of
London. In 2018, she was a Visiting Research Fellow at the Kenyon
Institute, East Jerusalem. Her PhD, a study of exilic Palestinian life
writing in English, was awarded in 2017 by the University of Kent. She
has published journal articles on Egyptian women’s blogs, the narration
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