Scholars Shir Alon and Joseph Farag join co-hosts Whitney Terrell and V.V. Ganeshananthan to discuss how Palestinian and Israeli writers have written about the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. Farag talks about the evolution of the portrayal of the Palestinian self in literature throughout history, as well as some of the themes and writers discussed in his book, Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story. Alon explains how the unprocessed trauma of the history of massacre and expulsion of Palestinians seems to stage an appearance in Israeli literature every decade. She also talks about Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom, Minor Detail by Adania Shibli, and Funeral at Noon by Yeshayahu Koren.

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This podcast is produced by Andrea Tudhope.

Selected readings:

Shir Alon

Static: Labor, Temporality, and Literary Form in Middle Eastern Modernisms (forthcoming book)
“The Ongoing Nakba and the Grammar of History,” LA Review of Books
“No One to See Here: Genres of Neutralization and the Ongoing Nakba”
“Gendering the Arab-Jew: Feminism and Jewish Studies After Ella Shohat”

Joseph Farag

Others:

Amos Oz
David Grossman
Facing the Forests by A. B. Yehoshua
Khirbet Khizeh by S. Yizhar
The Old New Land (Altneuland) by Theodor Herzl
Men in the Sun, Palestine's Children: Returning to Haifa and Other Stories, and All That's Left to You: A Novella and Other Stories by Ghassan Kanafani
"A Lover from Palestine," "ID Card," and many others by Mahmoud Darwish
The Ship by Jabra Ibrahim Jabra
Wild Thorns and Passage to the Plaza by Sahar Khalifeh
Eye of the Mirror and A Balcony Over the Fakihani by Liana Badr
Nathan Alterman
Funeral at Noon by Yeshayahu Koren
Minor Detail by Adania Shibli
Dolly City by Orly Castel-Bloom
The Sound of Our Steps by Ronit Matalon
Waltz with Bashir (film) by Ari Folman
The Pessoptimist by Emile Habibi
Divine Intervention, The Time that Remains, and It Must Be Heaven (films) by Elia Suleiman

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S4 Ep. 19: A Cycle of Disappearance: Shir Alon and Joseph Farag On How Palestinian and Israeli Literature Has Handled the Ongoing Conflict