Imagining Palestine

With elegant prose and insightful ideas, Tahrir Hamdi has written a theoretical work that will be of interest to students and scholars of Palestine and Middle East studies and Arabic literature. However, because she emphasizes that transformation of theory into action, her book belongs on the shelf of everyone who is participating in the solidarity movement, partly because she thoroughly explains what it means to act in solidarity but also because her prose counters defeatist attitudes with a blueprint for victory. * The Palestine Chronicle *
What is so brilliant about this book is that it links the human approach by so many of the Palestinians discussed here to the same paradoxical epistemo-logical and moral questions: navigating between their universal values, unconditional commitment to the liberation of Palestine, and their particular mode of expression. Such navigation is at the heart of the “Theory of Palestine.” * Ilan Pappe, Janus Unbound *
This book could only be written by Tahrir Hamdi, an esteemed literary scholar from a family rooted in Palestinian resistance politics. Hamdi here models Said’s ‘intransigent’ intellectual, demanding irresistibly that postcolonial studies reclaim its radical roots and, in accounting for Palestine, realign with decolonial politics. * Lindsey Moore, Lancaster University, UK *
Tahrir Hamdi’s perspicacious interrogation of works of major Palestinian literary figures and international solidarity poets, concretizes ideas of RETURN, as the Palestinian imaginary. RETURN presupposes the dismantling of Zionist institutions in the process of liberation to build a democratic Palestinian state. * Ibrahim Aoude, University of Hawaii-Manoa, Hawaii *