The international community, through the Oslo Accords, has created an intricate web of terminology that points towards a permanently stalled state-building process. In their book, The Palestinian Authority in the West Bank: The Theatrics of Woeful Statecraft (Routledge, 2019), Michelle Pace and Somdeep Sen expose what lies beneath the façade coined as the “State of Palestine”, a…
Tag: Book Review
Book Review: The Woman From Tantoura
An unfulfilled desire has no sanctuary other than remembrance. Radwa Ashour’s novel, The Woman from Tantoura (Hoopoe Fiction, 2019), explores the ramifications of memory and how its story is told. Chronology, while important, plays a lesser role than emotions, while memory takes on its own trajectory. “The story moves on, but sometimes not completely, because as…
Book Review: Palestine and Rule of Power. Local Dissent vs International Governance
This collection of well-researched essays provides an insight into the dynamics of how neoliberalism is woven within the Zionist colonial process and how it has created two opposing camps, succinctly described in the foreword by Richard Falk as the failure of UN diplomacy and the existing possibilities of Palestinian anti-colonial struggle. The neoliberal framework depoliticises…
Book review: Aya Dane
Mhani Alaoui lays bare the cliché of “forgotten memories” in her latest novel, Aya Dane (Interlink Books, 2018). Likewise, the perceptions of nostalgia and identity as imagined by an outsider also contribute to shifting memory into an isolated place. An implosion takes place which, for Aya Dane, starts unravelling when she received a letter from an art…
BOOK REVIEW ‘Mahmoud Darwish: Literature and the politics of Palestinian identity’
Far from accentuating the glorification that is synonymous with Mahmoud Darwish and his beautiful poetry, the new biography “Mahmoud Darwish: literature and the politics of Palestinian identity” by Muna Abu Eid (I.B. Tauris, 2016) is a competent exercise in revealing the intricacies of Palestinian collective memory combined with the complex persona of the man himself….
BOOK REVIEW:Life Lived in Relief — Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics
Refugee narratives beyond those which reach the mainstream media are fraught with complexities, while humanitarian aid remains insufficient. Ilana Feldman’s treatise “Life Lived in Relief — Humanitarian Predicaments and Palestinian Refugee Politics” (University of California Press, 2018) focuses on the discrepancies between the political and purportedly apolitical dynamics of the humanitarian sector. Feldman’s overview of…
BOOK REVIEW: Jose Carlos Mariategui. An Anthology
Connecting with an International Historical Reality: Book Review of “Jose Carlos Mariátegui: An Anthology “We do not want American socialism to be a copy or an imitation, it should be a heroic creation. We must give life to Indo-American socialism with our own life, in our own language.” Jose Carlos Mariátegui This anthology provides an…
BOOK REVIEW: Thorough Surveillance
Departing from the contradiction which mainstream narratives have assimilated into normalised recurrences, Ahmed Sa’di’s excellent treatise commences with a reminder that Israel has extended the existence of colonialism far beyond its alleged demise. Surveillance methods, historically implemented to control populations of colonised territories, have been adopted by Israel to consolidate the desired demographic changes aimed,…
BOOK REVIEW: Rhetorics of Belonging
Moving away from the emphasis placed by the mainstream upon narrative when discussing Palestinian and Israeli literature, Anna Bernard’s academic treatise, “Rhetorics of belonging: nation, narration and Israel/Palestine” (Liverpool University Press, 2013) provides rigorous insights into often overlooked experiences of nation and narration. Identity construction of Palestinians and Israelis has been shaped externally by hegemonic…
BOOK REVIEW: Building the Commune
Reviewed: Building the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela, by George Cicciarello-Maher, Verso Books, 2016. Venezuela’s kaleidoscopic political scene – a constant struggle which is often simplified in mainstream media – is articulated with clarity inBuilding the Commune: Radical Democracy in Venezuela (Verso Books, 2016). Drawing upon historical episodes and the more recent forms of right-wing violence, political…
RAMONA WADI 