Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Middle East Studies Beyond Dominant Paradigms)

Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive sense of rootedness, sustained and nurtured by a deep care for land stewardship and embedded in a spatialized history.In Rooted Movements, Amanda Batarseh examines the epistemology of Palestinian Indigeneity based in a radical relationship to place.Against a colonial logic that often centers displacement as the chief lens through which to understand Palestinian connection to place and spatialized existence, Batarseh argues that Palestinian literature poses Indigeneity as a dialectic relying as much upon rootedness as on ideas of movement. In elaborating this tension, Batarseh develops a methodology of reading Palestinian literature that foregrounds how Palestinians negotiate space and removal through liberatory mobilization and not as a symptom of zionist, colonial violence.Reading the poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, novels, and films of writers in Palestine and in exile-from Ghassan Kanafani to Naomi Shihab Nye,