Football

Abstract

of their ancestors and in having a strong identity of their own. Although contemporary Palestinian poets have been studied to some degree, and books and articles have been published about them, Palestinian performance artists , visual artists, and musicians have not been studied as much. Rahman tries to redress the balance in this small book of 190 pages, and she believes they all represent contemporary Palestinian political conditions and, as importantly, Palestinian aesthetics. Furthermore, she demonstrates in analytical detail that they continue Darwish’s vision and poetic legacy, and she convincingly argues that their work is nonetheless original and not derivative. To show that the political in good poetry and art is not mere propaganda for a cause, Rahman uses Jacques Roncière’s theorization of “dissensus” in his book Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010). The political in art is thus redefined, and art is shown to be able to interrupt dominant consensus and become dissensual while keeping its aesthetic qualities when it is generically good art. She applies this notion to the study of Palestinian poets and artists in the Palestinian territories and in Israel as well as in the Palestinian diaspora across continents. The result is this unique book with an acute vision into Palestinian poetry, art, and aesthetics , and into Palestinian identity and the current conditions in Palestine under Israeli occupation. While the reader is offered an understanding of Palestinian poetry in one chapter dealing with Suheir Hammad, Liana Badr, and Ghassan Zaqtan, he is treated to a review of the Palestinian cinema of Elia Suleiman, Hany Abu-Assad, and Rashid Masharawi in another; reading further, he is introduced to the visual art, photography , and videos of Palestinian artists Emily Jacir, Sharif Waked, Eman Haram, Mona Hatoum, Rehab Nazzal, and others in a following chapter. Palestinian rappers and hip-hop groups are studied in a later chapter as an expression of the politicization of youth, mostly protesting against the dispossession and alienation of Palestinians , sometimes even in Hebrew in order to reach Israeli audiences and sometimes in English in order to reach others still. In all cases, the poets and artists are shown to continue the poetics of Darwish and some other Palestinian writers, with whom they dialogue or intersect. Najat Rahman’s book is appreciated for being a good conspectus of Palestinian artists in the last two decades, particularly in the wake of Darwish’s powerful poetic works. With conciseness, it is successful in offering a clear study of a complex topic; and, in close readings of poems and art performances, the author beautifully shows how these artists express their belonging to Palestine despite many forces aiming at their erasure and how they have done so in aesthetically accepted ways. Issa J. Boullata McGill University, Montreal Jean-Philippe Toussaint. Football. Paris. Minuit. 2015. 122 pages. Jean-Philippe Toussaint introduces his new book on a very saturnine note, suggesting that it will please nobody, neither intellectuals , who are indifferent to soccer, nor soccer fans, who will find the book too intellectual. Were he writing about soccer and nothing else, Football would be far less intriguing. But many other things occupy Toussaint here: how the phenomenal world is often less attractive than the world conjured in our imagination; how melancholy serves both to sharpen and to blunt our perception of things; how a deliberately naïve, childlike approach to experience can help deflect our fear of dying; how the past escapes from us despite our best efforts to recapture it. “I’m pretending to write about soccer,” Toussaint confesses, “but I’m really writing , as always, about the passage of time.” That is not to say that soccer is absent from this book; to the contrary, it’s everywhere . But it interests Toussaint principally by virtue of the ways in which it fires his psyche. As staggeringly narcissistic as such a notion may seem, it is useful to remember that Toussaint has built a very distinguished literary career around the representation of the narcissistic subject; in a real sense, it’s his stock-in-trade. With that consideration in mind, Football may in fact be one of his less ego-driven texts because it opens patently onto the...