This is a study of Palestinian literature, particularly that written in Israel, within the political and social context of Palestinian society, with a special focus on literature written during the intifada "uprising" period of 1987-93.

Studies of Palestinian society, economy, and politics are appearing with increasing frequency, but works in English about Palestinian literature, particularly that written in Israel, are still scarce. This book looks at this literature within the political and social context of Palestinian society, with a special focus on literature written during the Intifada "uprising" period (1987-93).

This comprehensive anthology traces the written record of a people beset by nearly a century of conflict, exile, and dispersal. This collection includes poetry, fiction, and personal narratives by both establishing and rising Palestinian creative writers of the modern period.

"Jayyusi provides biographical information on the writers as well as a substantial introduction to the development of modern Arabic fictional genres that considers the central thematic and aesthetic concerns of Arab short story writers and novelists."--Jacket.

An Introduction to Modern Arab Culture exposes readers to fundamental characteristics of the Arab people, their culture, and their society. Over the course of 13 chapters, readers learn about the emergence and influence of Islam in Arab culture, religious and ethnic minorities within the Arab world, the critical role of family in Arab life, and the origin and evolution of the Arabic language. Dedicated chapters provide an introduction to the religion of Islam and the Qur'an, and an exploration of Islamic communities throughout the ages. Additional chapters explore Arab poetry, literature, music, values, and thought, revealing the impact of major artworks and their creators on Arab life and tradition. The final chapters address the Arab Spring, the ongoing Syrian refugee crisis, and contemporary challenges and opportunities. An Introduction to Modern Arab Culture introduces readers to aspects of Arab culture while demonstrating how these facets intertwine to create a unique tapestry of identity, experience, and history. The book is well suited to courses in Middle East culture and history, politics, thought, literature, religion, and language, and courses in sociology, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Palestinian Literature and Film in Postcolonial Feminist Perspective is the first sustained study of gender-consciousness in the Palestinian creative imagination. Drawing on concepts from postcolonial feminist theory, Ball analyses a range of literary and filmic works by major creative practitioners including Michel Khleifi , Liana Badr, Annemarie Jacir, Elia Suleiman, Mona Hatoum and Suheir Hammad, and reveals a hitherto unrecognized trajectory in gender-consciousness under development in the Palestinian imagination from the start of the twentieth century. The book explores how these works resonate with questions of power, identity, nation, resistance, and self-representation in the Palestinian imagination more broadly, and asks how these gender-conscious narratives transform our understanding of Palestine's struggle for postcoloniality. Working at the cusp of postcolonial, feminist and cultural enquiry, Ball seeks to open up vital new directions in the interdisciplinary study of Palestine.

The book that is providing a storm of controversy, from ‘Israel’s bravest historian’ (John Pilger) Renowned Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe's groundbreaking work on the formation of the State of Israel. 'Along with the late Edward Said, Ilan Pappe is the most eloquent writer of Palestinian history.' NEW STATESMAN Between 1947 and 1949, over 400 Palestinian villages were deliberately destroyed, civilians were massacred and around a million men, women, and children were expelled from their homes at gunpoint. Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called 'ethnic cleansing'. Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel’s founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East. *** 'Ilan Pappe is Israel's bravest, most principled, most incisive historian.' JOHN PILGER 'Pappe has opened up an important new line of inquiry into the vast and fateful subject of the Palestinian refugees. His book is rewarding in other ways. It has at times an elegiac, even sentimental, character, recalling the lost, obliterated life of the Palestinian Arabs and imagining or regretting what Pappe believes could have been a better land of Palestine.' TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT 'A major intervention in an argument that will, and must, continue. There's no hope of lasting Middle East peace while the ghosts of 1948 still walk.' INDEPENDENT

Despite, or even because of their tumultuous history, Palestinians are renowned for being prolific cultural producers, creating many of the Arab world's most iconic works of literature. In particular, the Palestinian short story stands out for its unique interplay between literary texts and the political and historical contexts from which they emerge. Palestinian Literature in Exile is the first English language study to explore this unique genre. Joseph Farag employs an interdisciplinary approach to examine the political function of literary texts and the manner in which cultural production responds to crucial moments in Palestinian history. Drawing from the works of Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani and Ibrahim Nasrallah, Farag traces developments in the short story as they relate to the pivotal events of what the Palestinians call the Nakba ('catastrophe'), Naksa ('defeat') and First Intifada ('uprising'). In analysing several as yet un-translated works, Farag makes an original contribution to the subject of exilic identity and subjectivity in Palestinian literature. This book offers the opportunity to engage with literary works as well to learn from a literary account of history.It is a subject of interest for students and scholars of both Arabic literature and Middle East studies.

Each year, Israel's young men and women are drafted into compulsory military service and are required to engage directly in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This conflict is by its nature intensely complex and is played out under the full glare of international security. So, how does Israel's education system prepare its young people for this? How is Palestine, and the Palestinians against whom these young Israelis will potentially be required to use force, portrayed in the school system? Nurit Peled-Elhanan argues that the textbooks used in the school system are laced with a pro-Israel ideology, and that they play a part in priming Israeli children for military service. She analyzes the presentation of images, maps, layouts and use of language in History, Geography and Civic Studies textbooks, and reveals how the books might be seen to marginalize Palestinians, legitimize Israeli military action and reinforce Jewish-Israeli territorial identity. This book provides a fresh scholarly contribution to the Israeli-Palestinian debate, and will be relevant to the fields of Middle East Studies and Politics more widely.

A sweeping new theory of world literature through a study of Palestinian and Israeli literature from the 1940s to the present. Makers of Worlds, Readers of Signs charts the aesthetic and political formation of neoliberalism and globalisation in Israeli and Palestinian literature from the 1940s to the present. By tracking literature’s move from making worlds to reading signs, Cohen Lustig proposes a new way to read and theorise our global contemporary. Cohen Lustig argues that the period of Israeli statism and its counterpart of Palestinian statelessness produced works that sought to make and create whole worlds and social time, from the creation of the new state of Israel to preserving collective visions of Palestinian statehood. During the period of neoliberalism, after 1985 in Israel and the 1993 Oslo Accords in Palestine, literature turned to the reading of signs, where politics and history are now rearticulated through the private lives of individual subjects. Here characters do not make social time but live within it and inquire after its missing origin. Cohen Lustig argues for new ways to track the subjectivities and aesthetics produced by larger shifts in production. In so doing, he proposes a new model to understand the historical development of Israeli and Palestinian literature as well as world literature in our contemporary moment. With a preface from Fredric Jameson.