by Mahdi Sabbagh
Haymarket Books
6/4/2024, paperback
SKU: 9798888900994
From the organizers of the Palestine Festival of Literature, this anthology of essays connects Palestinian resistance with global freedom struggles against settler colonialism and calls on us to think more concretely about the practice of solidarity.
The Palestine Festival of Literature, or PalFest, was created in 2008 as "a cultural initiative committed to the creation of language and ideas for combating colonialism in the 21st century." The annual festival brings authors from around the world to convene with readers, artists, writers, and activists in cities across Palestine for cross-pollination of radical art, ideas, and literature.
These efforts resulted in Their Borders, Our World, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include: Yasmin El-Rifae, Jehan Bseiso, Keller Easterling, Dina Omar, Tareq Baconi, Samia Henni, Omer Shah, Kareem Rabie, Ellen Van Neerven, Omar Robert Hamilton, and Mabel O. Wilson.
Each piece grapples with the questions: How do we confront the need to take inevitable and often difficult political stances? How do we make sense of the destruction, uprooting, and pain that we witness? And given our seemingly impossible reality, how is mutuality constructed?
Reviews:
"Edward Said once remarked Palestinians had been denied the permission to narrate their own histories and experiences. Much has changed since then. Their Borders, Our World brings together writers from PalFest, the international cultural solidarity initiative that defies the bans, borders, and bigotry aimed at snuffing out the vibrant Palestinian literary tradition. In the shadow of a Western-backed annihilationist campaign against Gaza and Palestinians, this volume does more than grant the permission to narrate: It is, without permission or apology, a call to liberate." -- Nick Estes, author of Our History Is the Future
"From exploring settler colonialism's banality to the violence of architecture, this timely highly-recommended book explores through ten innovative essays new insights into ways of understanding and building solidarities with Palestine." -- Raja Shehadeh
"All around the world the cry from the street is 'Free Palestine.' This vital and varied collection reveals some of the global solidarities that lie beneath that united cry, and in doing so asks us to consider what connections we can make, and what histories we might re-shape--together." -- Kamila Shamsie, author of Duckling
"Their Borders, Our World arrives as a meteor, incandescent, a signal of determination and solidarity in a dark time, assuring that Palestine will be free." -- Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, author or editor of many books, including An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States
About the Editor:
Mahdi Sabbagh is a writer, architect, and urbanist from Jerusalem. He is a co-curator of PalFest, the Palestine Festival of Literature. His work has been published in the Journal of Public Culture, Jerusalem Quarterly, Architecture of the Territory, Open Gaza, The Funambulist, Arab Urbanism, and PLATFORM. He is a 2023 Matakyev Research Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands. Mahdi is a PhD student at Columbia University and holds a Masters in Architecture from Yale.