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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 Beyond Frontiers, an anthology thoughtfully arranged and introduced by PalFest cocurator Mahdi Sabbagh. Contributors include writers and scholars such as Tareq Baconi and Dina Omar, architect Mabel O. Wilson, and filmmaker Omar Robert Hamilton, among others, each bringing their diverse intellectual and geographic backgrounds to the forefront. 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?
—Nick Estes (Lakota), author of Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock Versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and The Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance
"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, author of We Could Have Been Friends, My Father and I: A Palestinian Memoir
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 (Kaph Books, 2022), Open Gaza (AUC Press, 2021), 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.
Foreword
Yasmin el-Rifae
Why New Solidarities?
Mahdi Sabbagh
Gaza Lovesong
Jehan Bseiso
I. Choices Under Siege
Try to be in Palestine
Keller Easterling
Reflections on Structural Gaslighting
Dina Omar
Wretched Gaza: Confronting the Abject
Tareq Baconi
II. Witnessing
French-Israeli Nuclear Coloniality
Samia Henni
From Bilad al-Haramayn to al-Quds: Rumor, Sovereignty, and Solidarity
Omer Shah
Everywhere in the World there is a Chinatown, in China there is a Khaliltown
Kareem Rabie
III. Mutuality
Wounds in Place: Football as a Manual for Survival in Ongoing Colonization
Ellen van Neerven
City and Anti-City
Omar Robert Hamilton
Concerning the Violence of Architecture
Mabel O. Wilson