Activity

Powerful narratives do not give us static pictures of life; they are not true or accurate in any one-to-one mapping of the world. What they do, at their most imaginatively incisive, is foreground aspects of reality that go unnoticed, that are so familiar that we overlook them. More politically, the…

[...] The Palestinian novel arises out of conditions quite specific to the Palestinian conflict in its various stages from 1948 to the present. How do these geographical and historical specifities inform and, to an extent, determine novelist practice? What is the relationship between fictional word…

Abu Manneh argues that the response of many Palestinians to the nakba, the catastrophe of dispossession by the Israelis in 1948, was to articulate a revolutionary optimism in the potential of collective action to win back freedom and self-determination. Liberty was to be regained through armed stru…

Labor demand for export crops was driven both by territorial expansion and by the steadily rising yields from productivity-enhancing inputs. Whereas cattle ranching had low labor requirements, the new plantations were extremely labor-intensive, particularly during peak times of the production cycle…

Self-interested elite responses to either adversity or new opportunities in the world economy enhanced popular classes’ capacities for struggle. Elite efforts to modernize their economies, through industrialization or the promotion of agro-industrial exports, provided the foundations for working-cl…