Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel
Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print
Format:Hardback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:31st Jul '26
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
In the years after the Palestinian Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers created a cultural front of opposition to Zionism in the Communist magazine al-Jadid. Thinkers such as Hana Ibrahim, Tawfiq Zayyad, Sami Michael, Emile Habiby, Jabra Nicola,and Shimon Ballas formed a new literary aesthetics; they drew on internationalist, anti-colonial and Arab left cultures to challenge the Zionist narrative with stories of their communities. In Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, Hana Morgenstern brings this forgotten literary world and its radical commitments to collaboration to life for the first time, tracing its influences on decades of subversive writing, translation and print. She follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of what she terms cultural co-resistance. Engaging in close historical and literary readings informed by a decade of archival and field work, the book demonstrates how co-resistance shapes and innovates oppositional literature and social imaginaries practised jointly by Palestinians and Israeli Jews in the region. Published alongside this volume is the companion anthology A People’s Literature of Israel/Palestine: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing, which presents the Arabic-language fiction, essays and poetry of this early anticolonial circle in English translation for the first time. The two books together document and interpret cultural co-resistance, situating it within the wider traditions of internationalism, anti-Zionism, and anti-imperialism.
Hana Morgenstern's brilliant book is an incredible work of unlearning Zionist imperial temporality and its categories, and of refusing to abide by the brutal cut that the Nakba and the creation of "Israel" imposed on the life of Palestine, narrating a potential history of the entanglement between Palestinian voices and those of Jewish migrants from the Jewish-Muslim world. Morgenstern brilliantly rejects the Zionist premises of the categories of "Mizrahi" and "Mizrahi literature" in her careful, anticolonial readings of the literary activity around the journal al-Jadid, studying it not as a forgotten piece of history but as a still-urgent site of resistance — an emblematic example of what the Zionist West renders unthinkable. This is a must-read, especially today: amid the ongoing genocide fuelled by the West, such a study reminds us of the urgency of not letting the weaponry of AI write our histories. -- Ariella Azoulay, Brown University
Cultural Co-Resistance is an indispensable contribution to the scholarship on the intersections between Palestinians and Arab-Jews, here studied through the literary magazine Al-Jadid as shaped by these native Arabic-speakers. Morgenstern insightfully examines Al-Jadid within its global anticolonial context, shedding light on a shared culturally resistant site unfolding within the hegemonic Hebrew-speaking zone, but critically enacted in the Arabic language. -- Ella Shohat, New York University
A stunning, rigorously researched, clearly voiced study that excavates a suppressed history and decisively shifts the conversation around literature and cultural resistance in Palestine/Israel. Linking foundational Mizrahi and Palestinian literatures to socialist and internationalist movements and to each other, Morgenstern forges a groundbreaking critical framework. Her urgent, original, and persuasive argument for co-resistance will transform our understanding of political worlds and literary form. -- Lital Levy, Princeton University
Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel draws on the inspirational work of the al-Jadid collective to illuminate crucial questions about anticolonial literary theory and practice, the craft of committed literature and its relationship to organizational politics. This history of Palestinian and Arab Jewish co-resistance should be much better known, and Morgenstern’s lucid and compelling book does it justice. -- Anna Bernard, King's College London
ISBN: 9781399517904
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
304 pages