VENUE
Scheps Library, Room 457,
Department of Anthropology
Schermerhorn Extension
Advanced registration by 5pm, Tuesday, November 10, is required for all attendees, including CU/BC ID holders.
RASHID KHALIDI in conversation with ISABELLA HAMMAD about Ghassan Kanafani's “Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948-1968.”
Ghassan Kanafani’s remarkable extended essay Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968 is an unyielding act of cultural and political endurance. Writing in the wake of Israel’s devastating territorial expansion in 1967, Kanafani elaborates his theory of resistance literature and offers a visceral account of life under occupation. Translated for the first time into English by one of the greatest living translators from Arabic to English, Tarif Khalidi, Kanafani’s essay offers one of the sharpest social and political analyses of life in Palestine in this early period of occupation.
In the two decades following the Nakba, Palestinian writers undertook the gruelling task of advancing a cultural struggle to protect their language, culture, and heritage. In addition to Kanafani’s groundbreaking essay, the book includes a selection of poetry, prose, and dramatic writing curated by Ghassan Kanafani himself. Alongside writing from Mahmoud Darwish, Hanna Abu Hanna, and Samih al-Qasim, among many others, Kanafani’s essay and the accompanying pieces stand as a defiant declaration of cultural survival in the wake of Israeli expansion.
This first English edition of Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation is a joint publication with the Institute for Palestine Studies.
Copies of Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation will be available for purchase at the event.
RASHID KHALIDI is Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of numerous books and articles, including The Hundred Years' War on Palestine (2020), a landmark history of one hundred years of war waged against the Palestinians from the foremost US historian of the Middle East, told through pivotal events and family history.
ISABELLA HAMMAD is a novelist and Writer in Residence at NYU. Her debut novel The Parisian (2019), won a Palestine Book Award, the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and a Betty Trask Award. Her second novel Enter Ghost (2023) received the Encore Award and the Aspen Words Literary Prize. Her book-length essay Recognizing the Stranger (2024), was longlisted for the 2024 NBCC Award for Criticism.