The Center for Palestine Studies (CPS) at Columbia University invites you to the book launch of Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced and a discussion with author Rochelle A. Davis.
More than 120 village memorial books, about the over 400 Palestinian villages that were depopulated and largely destroyed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War have been published. Compiled as documentary histories and based on the accounts of those who remember their villages, they are presented as dossiers of evidence that these villages existed and were more than just "a place once on a map."
Based on her new book, Palestinian Village Histories: Geographies of the Displaced (Stanford University Press, 2010), Davis examines one facet of what it means to be a Palestinian refugee through how the villages, their histories, and the village books are part of people's lives today. A clear historiographical picture of pre-1948 village history has not yet developed, thus her talk focuses on the writing of history, the ways that peasant history is recorded in the absence of written sources, refugee understandings of home, the attraction of memory, and ways of commemorating the past in the present.
Rochelle A. Davis is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.
Read the books here
*This event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will be served.*
Monday, 15 November 2010, 12:00 - 2:00 PM
Knox Hall, Room 207.