Palestinian Collective Memory and National Identity PDF Download

Author: M. Litvak
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 0230621635
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
This book analyzes the evolution and cultivation of modern Palestinian collective memory and its role in shaping Palestinian national identity from its inception in the 1920s to the 2006 Palestinian elections.

Author: Ahmad H. Sa'di
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231509707
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 375

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Book Description
For outside observers, current events in Israel, Gaza, and the West Bank are seldom related to the collective memory of ordinary Palestinians. But for Palestinians themselves, the iniquities of the present are experienced as a continuous replay of the injustice of the past. By focusing on memories of the Nakba or "catastrophe" of 1948, in which hundreds of thousands of Palestinians were dispossessed to create the state of Israel, the contributors to this volume illuminate the contemporary Palestinian experience and clarify the moral claims they make for justice and redress. The book's essays consider the ways in which Palestinians have remembered and organized themselves around the Nakba, a central trauma that continues to be refracted through Palestinian personal and collective memory. Analyzing oral histories and written narratives, poetry and cinema, personal testimony and courtroom evidence, the authors show how the continuing experience of violence, displacement, and occupation have transformed the pre-Nakba past and the land of Palestine into symbols of what has been and continues to be lost. Nakba brings to light the different ways in which Palestinians experienced and retain in memory the events of 1948. It is the first book to examine in detail how memories of Palestine's cataclysmic past are shaped by differences of class, gender, generation, and geographical location. In exploring the power of the past, the authors show the urgency of the question of memory for understanding the contested history of the present. Contributors: Lila Abu Lughod, Columbia University; Diana Keown Allan, Harvard University; Haim Bresheeth, University of East London; Rochelle Davis, Georgetown University; Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley; Isabelle Humphries, University of Surrey; Lena Jayyusi, Zayed University; Laleh Khalili, SOAS, University of London; Omar Al-Qattan, filmmaker; Ahmad H. Sa'di, Ben-Gurion University; Rosemary Sayigh, Lebanon-based anthropologist; Susan Slyomovics, University of California, Los Angeles

Author: Sharif Kanaana
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443887862
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 110

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Book Description
During the 1948 Nakba, around three quarters of a million Palestinians were driven out of their homes and became refugees. Since then, they have not been allowed to return to their homeland, but have not given up. Originally concentrated mainly in neighbouring Arab countries, they have, in their attempts for survival, spread throughout the world, and are now found in most European countries, the United States, Canada, and several South American countries. This book is a result of a conference held on the theme of “the Future of Palestinian Identity”, which resulted from a prevailing feeling among Palestinians, both academics and otherwise, that Palestinian identity seems to be suffering from a state of weakening and retreat. The conference was intended to increase awareness of the dangers threatening Palestinian identity. As a result, the contributions to this volume study, analyse, and suggest solutions to the problems facing Palestinian identity today, and centre around four main themes, namely: the history of the emergence and development of Palestinian national identity, considering the circumstances which led to its emergence and the main stages in this development; the constituent elements of Palestinian national identity, looking at what makes a person Palestinian and the shared symbols of Palestinian identity; the extent to which a shared Palestinian identity is necessary; and the future of this identity. Contributors include both Palestinian and international scholars.

Author: Riad M. Nasser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135931364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
The book examines the process of national identity formation. It argues that identity, whether of a small community, a nation, an ethnic group, or a religious community, requires an Other against whom it becomes meaningful. In other words, identity develops via difference from Others against whom our sense of self becomes meaningful. This thesis emerges out of the synthesis the study develops from the from the various modern and poststructuralist theories of identity and nationalism.

Author: Yael Zerubavel
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 9780226981581
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 380

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Book Description
Because new nations need new pasts, they create new ways of commemorating and recasting select historic events. In Recovered Roots, Yael Zerubavel illuminates this dynamic process by examining the construction of Israeli national tradition. In the years leading to the birth of Israel, Zerubavel shows, Zionist settlers in Palestine consciously sought to rewrite Jewish history by reshaping Jewish memory. Zerubavel focuses on the nationalist reinterpretation of the defense of Masada against the Romans in 73 C.E. and the Bar Kokhba revolt of 133-135; and on the transformation of the 1920 defense of a new Jewish settlement in Tel Hai into a national myth. Zerubavel demonstrates how, in each case, Israeli memory transforms events that ended in death and defeat into heroic myths and symbols of national revival. Drawing on a broad range of official and popular sources and original interviews, Zerubavel shows that the construction of a new national tradition is not necessarily the product of government policy but a creative collaboration between politicans, writers, and educators. Her discussion of the politics of commemoration demonstrates how rival groups can turn the past into an arena of conflict as they posit competing interpretations of history and opposing moral claims on the use of the past. Zerubavel analyzes the emergence of counter-memories within the reality of Israel's frequent wars, the ensuing debates about the future of the occupied territories, and the embattled relations with Palestinians. A fascinating examination of the interplay between history and memory, this book will appeal to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, political scientists, and folklorists, as well as to scholars of cultural studies, literature, and communication.

Author: Tahrir Hamdi
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755617843
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 249

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Book Description
All national identities are somewhat fluid, held together by collective beliefs and practices as much as official territory and borders. In the context of the Palestinians, whose national status in so many instances remains unresolved, the articulation and 'imagination' of national identity is particularly urgent. This book explores the ways that Palestinian intellectuals, artists, activists and ordinary citizens 'imagine' their homeland, examining the works of key Palestinian thinkers and writers such as Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Al Ali. Deploying Benedict Anderson's notion of 'Imagined Communities' and Edward Soja's theory of 'Third Space', Tahrir Hamdi argues that the imaginative construction of Palestine is a key element in the Palestinians' ongoing struggle. An interdisciplinary work drawing upon critical theory, postcolonial studies and literary analysis, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Palestine and Middle East studies and Arabic literature

Author: Farah Aboubakr
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786725797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 260

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Book Description
Folktales are instrumental in ensuring the survival of oral traditions and strengthening communal bonds. Both the stories and the process of storytelling itself help to define social, cultural and political identity. For Palestinians, the threat of losing their heritage has engendered a sense of urgency among storytellers and Palestinian folklorists. Yet there has been remarkably little academic scholarship dedicated to the tradition. Farah Aboubakr here analyses a selection of folktales edited, compiled and translated by Ibrahim Muhawi and Sharif Kanaana in Speak, Bird, Speak Again (1989). In addition to the folktales themselves, Muhawi and Kanaana's collection is renowned for providing readers with extensive folkloric, historical and anthropological annotations. Here, for the first time, the folktales and the compilers' work on them, are the subject of scholarly analysis. Synthesising various disciplines including memory studies, gender studies and social movement studies, Aboubakr uses the collection to understand the politics of storytelling and its impact on Palestinian identity. In particular, the book draws attention to the female storytellers who play an essential role in transmitting and preserving collective memory and culture. The book is an important step towards analysing a significant genre of Palestinian literature and will be relevant to scholars of Palestinian politics and popular culture, gender studies and memory studies, and those interested in folklore and oral literature.

Author: Fiorella Larissa Erni
Publisher:
ISBN: 2940503133
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description
After six decades of protracted refugeehood, patterns of social identification are changing among the young people of the fourth refugee generation in the Palestinian refugee camp Burj al-Shamali in Southern Lebanon. Though their identity as Palestinian refugees remains the same compared to older refugee generations, there is an important shift in the young refugees’ relationship towards the homeland, their status as refugees, Islam, the camp society, as well as in their relationship towards religious or ethnic “others” in and outside Lebanon. This ePaper examines how technology, globalisation and outside influences have impacted the young Palestinians’ interpretation of their identity and their understanding of Palestinianness. The author concludes with reflections on the young refugees’ attitudes towards their Palestinian identity in the diaspora, which, as she argues, can only survive when the young refugees see their identity as a virtue rather than as a hindrance.

Author: Yifat Gutman
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826503918
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
SAGE Memory Studies Journal & Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award, Honorable Mention, 2019 Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this rich ethnographic study offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens--Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna--showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies. These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict's origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization--albeit not without a backlash. Contested memories saturate this society. The 1948 war is remembered as both Independence Day by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the catastrophe") by Palestinians. The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees.

Author: Yifat Gutman
Publisher: Vanderbilt University Press
ISBN: 0826521355
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
SAGE Memory Studies Journal & Memory Studies Association Outstanding First Book Award, Honorable Mention, 2019 Set in Israel in the first decade of the twenty-first century and based on long-term fieldwork, this rich ethnographic study offers an innovative analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It explores practices of "memory activism" by three groups of Jewish-Israeli and Arab-Palestinian citizens--Zochrot, Autobiography of a City, and Baladna--showing how they appropriated the global model of truth and reconciliation while utilizing local cultural practices such as tours and testimonies. These activist efforts gave visibility to a silenced Palestinian history in order to come to terms with the conflict's origins and envision a new resolution for the future. This unique focus on memory as a weapon of the weak reveals a surprising shift in awareness of Palestinian suffering among the Jewish majority of Israeli society in a decade of escalating violence and polarization--albeit not without a backlash. Contested memories saturate this society. The 1948 war is remembered as both Independence Day by Israelis and al-Nakba ("the catastrophe") by Palestinians. The walking tour and survivor testimonies originally deployed by the state for national Zionist education that marginalized Palestinian citizens are now being appropriated by activists for tours of pre-state Palestinian villages and testimonies by refugees.