Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Para Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space, (Hardcover)

<p>Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive sense of rootedness, sustained and nurtured by a deep care for land stewardship and embedded in a spatialized history. In<i> Rooted Movements</i>, Amanda Batarseh examines the epistemology of Palestinian Indigeneity based in a radical relationship to place. Against a colonial logic that often centers displacement as the chief lens through which to understand Palestinian connection to place and spatialized existence, Batarseh argues that Palestinian literature poses Indigeneity as a dialectic relying as much upon rootedness as on ideas of movement. </p><p>In elaborating this tension, Batarseh develops a methodology of reading Palestinian literature that foregrounds how Palestinians negotiate space and removal through liberatory mobilization and not as a symptom of zionist, colonial violence. Reading the poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, novels, and films of writers in Palestine and in exile--from Ghassan Kanafani to Naomi Shihab Nye, Hussein Barghouthi, Raja Shehadeh, Ibtisam Azem, and Randa Jarrar--she exposes the limitations of focusing on the geopolitical borders of a modern nation-state and offers alternative imaginaries not bound by colonial spatial control. Instead, the Palestinian poetics of space Batarseh articulates engage rooted movement as an Indigenous expression of deep-seated and enduring connections to place. Palestine, this place, is not static, enclosed by military boundaries, or frozen in time before or after the Nakba, but generative and looking toward a Palestinian future.</p>

• Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Para Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space, (Hardcover)
• Author: Amanda Batarseh
• ISBN: 9780815612216
• Format: Hardcover
• Publication Date: 2026-10-21
• Page Count: 528