Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a celebration of Rana Barakat’s new book, Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine (The University of North Carolina Press, March 2026).

Copies of Ongoing Return will be available for purchase.

ABOUT
In Palestine, a walk across the landscape is a journey of return that defies time, layered with sediments of personal experience and collective peoplehood. For Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat, the experience of place is guided by the stories and memories of her grandmother, who was among the 750,000 people forcibly displaced in 1948 by the newly formed Israeli government. Since then, the violence of settler colonialism has actively prevented the return of Palestinian refugees, including those from Lifta, her family’s ancestral village. In the present, the settler state of Israel controls the fate of the remaining structures in Lifta, enforcing so-called development plans that limit access and leave the valley appearing frozen in time. By gathering stories from family and community members alongside archival sources and lived experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, Barakat reveals how storytelling provides a form of ongoing return to a once-thriving village and to Palestine itself.

One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Barakat offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and the lives of its people today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.

SPEAKERS
RANA BARAKAT is an associate professor of history and the Director of Birzeit University Museum in Palestine. Her research interests include the history and historiography of colonialism, nationalism, and cultures of resistance. She earned her PhD in history from the University of Chicago and has published in notable venues including the Journal of Palestine Studies, Jerusalem Quarterly, Settler Colonial Studies, and Native American and Indigenous Studies. Her new book, Ongoing Return: Mapping Memory and Storytelling in Palestine (UNC Press), advances an Indigenous understanding of time, space, and memory in Palestine by focusing on the details of the people and place of Lifta village over time. She is currently working on her next book, "The Buraq Revolt: Constructing a History of Resistance in Palestine," which argues that this 1929 revolt was the first sign in the Mandate period of sustained mass resistance to the settler-colonial project, including direct and rhetorical actions against both political Zionism and British imperialism, planting seeds of mass political mobilization.

Rana is currently the Belknap Visiting Associate Professor in the Humanities Council and Department of Anthropology at Princeton University.

NADIA ABU EL-HAJ is Ann Whitney Olin Professor in the Departments of Anthropology at Barnard College and Columbia University and Director of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.