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Postcolonial studies have dealt with the protest literature since they consider it as the voice of the oppressed people. In the same aspect, resistance literature begins in Palestine with Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish after 1948. Protest literature aims not only at freeing the oppressed from dominating powers and overturning the authority but also at liberating the humans from oppression. "The term resistance "Moqawamah" was first applied in a description of Palestinian Literature in 1966 by the Palestinian writer Ghassan Kanfani in his study "Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine" (Harlow, 1987). Mahmoud Darwish has been involved in Palestine's political affairs throughout his entire life. In "I Come from There", Darwish tries to raise the voice of Palestinians; therefore, it can be heard all over the world. The theme of this poem assures his refusal to forget his country and unveils the struggle for a doomed homeland. By appropriating the descriptive and analytical method, along with the discourse analysis of Darwish's terms and phrases in the poem "I Come from There", this paper clarifies the symbolic meaning of the words to represent his sense of loss and sense of possession that he feels towards his land. Against this, the paper argues whether resistance protest literature succeeds in defending oppressed people and giving the subaltern their voices and whether literature helps the occupied people to get free and believe in non-violent resistance instead of violent resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, the author offers a testimony of his experience witnessing the genocide of the Palestinian people—his people—from Amman, Jordan, through a recounting of conversations with a friend from Gaza. Juxtaposed with reflections on the historical and topographic unity of the lands of Jordan and Palestine, the author pays tribute to the ongoing resistance of the people of Jordan, the majority of whom are descendants of displaced Palestinians from 1948 and 1967, since the genocide began. He concludes with an affirmation of the importance of October 7 for the collective present and future of the fragmented Palestinian people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews recent books by Jewish thinkers that critique the idea of a Jewish state from the perspective of Jewish exile. It outlines two main approaches. The first, secular approach, rejects the Jewish state in favor of a secular state, seeing Judaism itself as the problem, whether arising from biblical violence or collective identity. The second, post-secular approach, rejects the Jewish state as secular, and finds resources in Jewish tradition for an alternative political vision centered on exile, understood as resistance to sovereignty and violence. This article argues that Jewish opposition to the Jewish state aims to limit sovereignty, integrate Jews into the Middle East space, and recover an exilic Jewish tradition of social ethics and pluralism. The idea of exile thus provides resources for envisioning decolonization and coexistence in Israel–Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a selection of Mahmoud Darwish’s poetry and Samuel Beckett’s Murphy (1938) as postcolonial texts which are rich with postcolonial undertones. Beckett and Darwish articulate a counter-discursive rhetoric that undermines any hierarchically installed oppressive structures. Although political classifications and restrictions limit many neutral inquiries of such texts and hinder objective scholarship on Irish and Palestinian literature, many academic studies on Irish and Palestinian forms of literature have emerged. Counteracting hubristic structures, this paper tackles works from Ireland and Palestine as predominantly imbued with postcolonial implications. The research brings these authors from far-flung parts of the world to address postcolonial manifestations in Ireland and Palestine. Despite their convergences and divergences, texts from both perspectives must be used to critique structures and forces of colonialism in order to further contextualize them within the postcolonial realm. Reading Beckett alongside Darwish helped to solidify the idea that colonialism employs the same discourse regardless of place or time. It also demonstrates that oppressed people tend to employ comparable dissent mechanisms. Much like the speakers of Darwish’s Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, Leaves of Olives, “Mural,” and “My Mother” are always caught up in subordinate power relations, the eponymous protagonist of Murphy is degraded as an inferior other; one who is disenfranchised and excluded both inside and outside Ireland. Both authors refute stereotypes and stigmatization and offer a dissenting paradigm blurring power-based divisions to the status quo that renders the Palestinians and Irish as inferior to others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Palestine Writes literature festival (Philadelphia, September 2023) offered a rich space to vocalize and vitalize the multitude of Palestinian experiences across historical Palestine and throughout the shatat, and to broaden our commitments as Palestinians in literature and beyond. The festival, bravely held despite a vicious and prolonged attack to defund it and suppress its voices, hosted a multitude of literary and scholarly voices that addressed questions of collectivity, creativity, and fragmentation, with the politics of language, translation, and audience being a recurring theme for panelists. From investigating the potentialities of writing exile, displacement, and critique to the realities of translating Palestine, the festival identified the urgency of themes such as (mis)translation and bilingualism, and the role linguistic subversion plays in inhabiting and inscribing Palestine across cultures. The festival, and despite the general absence of a cohesive inquiry into the question of Palestinian literature written not by, or for, Anglophones, has nonetheless stirred conversations about national-symbolic and thematic clichés, the (re)creation of Palestine through language, the conditions of writing in/from exile, and the collectivity of the Palestinian wound. In this review, Ahmad Abu Ahmad interrogates the linguistic realities for Palestinian authorship and their audience, and invites us to rethink the relationship between Palestinians, their lived experiences, and language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 'The Palestinian exile as writer', Jabra Ibrahim Jabra gives a brief description of his suitcase that he carried over from his life in Palestine before the Nakba of 1948 to his life in Iraq thereafter. Reading his suitcase as a literary trope, I aim to unpack his suitcase and to re-vision, in fragments, what it contained. At the same time, I aim to show the limits of what can be recovered and explore silences in the archive. Drawing on studies in global modernism in addition to archival research and the close reading of Jabra's autobiographical writing, I argue that Jabra and his Palestinian co-wanderers did not come to Iraq and all the other places they turned to after 1948 empty-handed; rather, they carried suitcases filled with past experiences as well as dreams and expectations for the future, which placed them at the avant-garde of cultural and intellectual life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The present study analyses the gendered impact of the ongoing conflict between Israel and Palestine. If conflict has a certain bearing on men, so on women. It offers an insight into the experiences of women during the conflict and beyond, the loss of dignity and independence and how they grapple with all these issues. The study explores the ways Palestinian women are shaped by perpetual patriarchy and political power struggles. It tries to capture their struggle with identity and exile and how they anchor the Palestinian narrative by highlighting the changing roles of women and their engagement in community activism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi was a Palestinian doctor and a leading figure in Palestinian politics during the British Mandate period. He served as mayor of Jerusalem from 1934-37, helped to found the Reform Party, and represented that party in the Arab Higher Committee. In 1937, the British government exiled him to the Seychelles for his political activities, and eventually released him in spring 1939. While in exile, al-Khalidi wrote a daily diary in English. Edited by Rafiq Husseini, and including an introduction by Rashid Khalidi, the diary has now been published for the first time. What follows is a reviewessay on this important new historical source. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How the land of Palestine is imagined goes to the heart of Palestinian identity, making the process a significant and fraught endeavor. However, while the centrality of land to the imagined geography of Palestine has long been acknowledged, less attention has been paid to Palestine's sea. This paper therefore explores how the canonical Palestinian authors, Ghassan Kanafani and Jabra Ibrahim Jabra represent – or omit – the sea in their works. I argue that, as members of the Nakba generation, for these two authors the sea signifies a one-way passage into exile, thus casting Palestine's shores and sea as abject spaces, severed from the imagined geography of homeland, producing what I term "terracentric" discourses of Palestinian homeland. The paper's conclusion turns its attention to contemporary Palestinian cultural production to address the ways subsequent generations of Palestinians have begun to reconceptualize the relationship between the land and sea of Palestine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This forum traces the specificity and complexity of the Palestinian refugee. In centering Palestinian subjectivity and the nature of settler colonial displacement, the authors illuminate the contributions of the Palestinian refugee experience to various fields, especially the field of critical refugee studies. As they respond to key concerns in the context of Palestine and its refugees, the contributors interrogate the power dynamics that work to determine refugee fate, situate ancestral knowledge and the revolutionary role of Palestinian women, challenge discursive trends that racialize Palestinians, and illuminate the land-based struggle and the actions and hopes of the Palestinian project of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mona Hajjar Halaby's memoir takes readers on a journey to Palestine, past and present. The daughter of exiled Palestinians from Jerusalem, Halaby, like many Palestinians, spent her life in the diaspora hearing stories from her mother, Zakia, of her parents' childhood and their home. Unlike most Palestinians in the diaspora, however, Halaby was able to return to Palestine to teach in Ramallah for a year in 2007. Halaby devoted herself to the children of Ramallah, on the one hand teaching them patience and introspection, and on the other, learning from their resilience and wisdom. Halaby describes in detail the impressive march she organized of a group of Palestinians and their supporters through West Jerusalem streets on the sixtieth anniversary of the Nakba in 2008. She also tells how she entered her mother's home in Jerusalem - albeit with the help of an Israeli Jew and by not revealing her true identity - and conversed with the Israeli Jewish occupants in it. A sorrowful and painful account of return that offers a moving reflection on longing and loss, Halaby's memoir is also an empowering and inspiring must read for Palestinians in exile, and for anyone interested in the historical and ongoing plight of the Palestinians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā's representations of Palestinian exile by focusing on his 1970 novel, al-Safīnah (The Ship, 1985). Critics have argued over whether Jabrā adequately connects his characters to "reality" on land. By attending to the Palestinian character Wadīʿ's narrative in the novel, I argue that it is through this retreat from "reality," or from realistic representations of Wadīʿ's life in Palestine, that the novel shapes Palestinian exile as a dislocation in both time and space. Dreamlike memories and utopic fantasies of return mirror the structure of that other fantasy, of returning in historico-political time. Thus the novel signals the time-space of Palestinian exile as both a separation from the historical land of Palestine, and an exile in history: an alienation not only from Palestine as a geographical area, but also from Palestine before the catastrophe of the Nakbah. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article seeks to demonstrate a post-Saidian theory of Palestinian exile via a close reading of Mourid Barghouti’s memoirsI Saw Ramallah(1997; trans. 2000) andI Was Born There, I Was Born Here(2009; trans. 2011). After outlining Anna Bernard’s objections to Said, it then traces Barghouti’s development of a more fluid, encompassing notion of exile that resists idealization while remaining faithful to the core postcolonial issues of colonial history and theNakba. By carefully attending to Barghouti’s experiences at Allenby Bridge, it argues that the national checkpoint is a pivotal site where the dynamic of post-Saidian exile is defined. These experiences suggest temporal and generational modes of exile that, supplementing Patrick Williams’s delineation of the various “modes of dispossession experienced by Palestinians”, are central to a wider theorization. I conclude that post-Saidian exile comprises an important new direction for a postcolonial studies attuned to Palestine’s colonial history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the first translation of his work into English in the 1970s Mahmoud Darwish has been internationally received as a spokesman for the Palestinian national cause in exile. Associating himself and his work with resistance, Darwish's poetry has been instrumental in voicing Palestinian political demands such as the right of return. In the last two decades, however, there has been a marked shift in Darwish's poetry towards a recognition of the impossibility of physical return. Although this development has been critically acknowledged, readings such as Anette Månsson's (2003) which focus on return – as a symbolic rather than physical possibility in Darwish's work – are still prevalent in English language criticism. This essay argues that Darwish in his later work ‘Don't Apologize for What You've Done’ problematizes any return at all – including the symbolic and metaphoric – and moves away from representing the communal experience of exile, driven by the possibility of return, in favour of the more private experience of exile as a poet. It suggests that the desire to read Darwish as a national representative and his more private concerns with exile do not align as neatly in his later poetry as previous criticism has suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to view the apparent contradiction between Edward W. Said's universal criticism of nationalism and his commitment to the Palestinian national cause. The article claims that the two notions can be reconciled in two ways: in the post-Zionist scholarship, impacted on by Said's work, and in Said's later writings and thought on the intellectual and her role in a future society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines and problematizes the idea of return in the autobiography of Mourid Barghouti's Ra'aytu Ram Allah (I Saw Ramallah). After thirty years of living in Egypt and Budapest, Barghouti returned to his hometown Ramallah in 1996 for a short visit that composes the core of his text. I investigate how Barghouti's text unveils the Palestinian exile as a permanent state, but also as a challenged, resisted, or accepted the process of shifting people and places over time. By re-examining this autobiography within the frame of reading it as a displaced text, (or "displaced autobiography") I show how I Saw Ramallah seeks to move beyond the state of exile and expose its aftermath, especially when the displaced person is back in his or her homeland. I also explore how the author's return to his original place invokes the memory of a remote past, inviting a buried or forgotten selfhood. I argue that by recalling this past, which occurred before displacement, a displaced autobiographer like Barghouti attempts to "fix" Palestine as a land for the people who have memories and history in it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]