Palestinian American Research Articles

Palestinian American Women and Marital Choices Across Generations

Abstract This paper examines Palestinian women’s marriage preferences and the ways they incorporate national/cultural elements into their self-initiated marriage process in order to mitigate the reactions of their families and local community in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Marriage decisions among Palestinians in diaspora are a complex affair defined by notions of nationalism, kin relations, and religion, with their inherent gendered aspects. These notions reveal an array of actions and choices that testify to the ways in which women build strategies to deal with their realities and increase their agency. Their access to higher education, careers, and residences in multi-cultural locations allow them to redefine gender roles and control their marriage choices. Intermarriage outside their ethnic and national groups, increase in marriage age, and marriage processes that are self-initiated yet devised and presented in the form of customary marriage patterns emerge as visible phenomena among second-generation Palestinian Muslims. The decreasing number of suitable potential spouses drives a considerable number of Palestinian American women to look outside their national and ethnic group for marriage partners, thereby prioritizing their universal, religious identity as Muslims over Palestinian ethnic identity. This study uses oral interviews and community observation to examine how Palestinian Muslim women maintained some symbolic customary practices and challenged others by conceptualizing, utilizing, and modifying their group cultural and religious values in order to expand the boundaries of their gender roles and increase their power in negotiating marriage choices.

Claims of memory: Transgenerational traumas, fluid identities, and resistance in Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses

ABSTRACT Displacement from one’s homeland and the inability to return problematize definitions of diaspora, belonging, and identity. Palestinian American Hala Alyan’s 2017 novel Salt Houses reconfigures these terms in its recapitulation of Palestinian history as traumatic memories. This article explores the importance of home both as private space, temporal or spatial, and as an embodiment of social texture and cultural identity. Trauma theory has been challenged for its treatment of the Palestinian experience. This article assesses its usefulness in tracing Alyan’s portrayal of the Yacoubs, a middle-class Palestinian family, and their reaction to wars and catastrophes, mainly those known as the 1948 exodus and the 1967 setback. Salt Houses suggests that such traumatic events can be transmitted to future Palestinian generations and define their transnational identity in diaspora. It illustrates how traumatic memories can serve as a form of resistance against the erasure of the personal and collective memories of Palestinians.

Testifying Graphically: Bearing Witness to a Palestinian Childhood in Leila Abdelrazaq’s Baddawi

This article reads the graphic account Baddawi by Palestinian American artist Leila Abdelrazaq as a narrative of bearing witness to a refugee childhood. It investigates the ways in which the word-image intersection of the comics form both enables and extends the politics of testimony in a Palestinian narrative that positions a child as its seeing subject.

Entangled suffering and disruptive empathy: The Holocaust, the Nakba and the Israeli–Palestinian conflict in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin

Discussions of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict are rarely far from the topic of the Holocaust, often taking the form of competitive victimhood, as supporters of both sides politicize the memory of the genocide for their political gain. In her 2010 novel Mornings in Jenin, Palestinian–American Susan Abulhawa interweaves a Palestinian narrative of history – including the Nakba, that is, the destruction of historical Palestine in 1948, the ongoing conflict and the Israeli occupation – with Holocaust memory. By acknowledging rather than minimizing or denying the Israelis’ cultural trauma, she takes a stance of empathy, which researchers consider a prerequisite for peaceful conflict transformation. I contend that Mornings in Jenin exemplifies how cultural texts not only provide a space to explore how new mnemonic links are being drawn up against contested and reified national narratives in Israel/Palestine but also play a political role by performing a narrative that acknowledges the cultural trauma of the other side.

“Breaking language”: Performance and community in Suheir Hammad’s poetry

ABSTRACTThis article examines Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad’s strategy of “breaking language” across literary and performative modes, with a particular focus on the community structures that she establishes among her audiences and readers. It argues that her poetry – especially in its online remediation – challenges reactionary, nationalistic appeals to identity in the wake of public crisis by incorporating the disruptive action of “breaking” as a literary and performative device. In doing so, her work helps build more open, heterogeneous, and transnational affective bonds, both across and between established community lines. Reading performativity and community as major themes across Hammad’s work, the article tracks these influences from her performance of “first writing since” in 2002 to her 2008 poetry collection, breaking poems. An exploration of the connection between performativity and community in Hammad’s work is vital to understanding her contribution to contemporary American poetry and the broader literary landscape of postcolonial diaspora.

Palestine Unbound

Published each issue, this section strives to capture the tenor and content of popular conversations related to the Palestinians and the Arab-Israeli conflict, which are held on dynamic platforms unbound by traditional media. Therefore, items presented in this section are from a variety of sources and have been selected because they either have gone viral or represent a significant cultural moment or trend. A version of Palestine Unbound is also published on Palestine Square (http://palestinesquare.com), a blog of the Institute for Palestine Studies. Stories from this quarter (16 May–15 August 2019) include the international boycott of the 2019 Eurovision Song Contest, held this year in Tel Aviv; the viral reaction to Palestinian American model Anwar Hadid's first music video, which was filmed in the occupied West Bank, and Palestinian's chagrin at the Israeli-sponsored visit Saudi influencer and Zionist activist Mohammed Saud. Trending hashtags this quarter are #DareToDreamTogether and #Motabi‘_saudi_fi_Filistin.

The Palestinian Diaspora and Latin American Solidarity with the Palestinian Cause: Brazil as a Model

The Palestinian diaspora and Arab communities in Latin America, especially in Brazil, have contributed significantly to the Palestinian cause in Latin America. The convergence between these communities and union and left parties encouraged the left to include the Palestinian cause on its agenda. Brazil may be considered a model in this respect because of the influence of its Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT), which led the Latin American left after the founding of the São Paulo Forum in 1992. The Palestinian community has an even greater role to play today, the more so since the PT’s exclusion from power favors Israel at the expense of the Palestinian cause. A diáspora palestina e as comunidades árabes na América Latina, especialmente no Brasil, teem contribuído significativamente para a causa palestina na América Latina. A convergência entre essas comunidades, sindicatos e partidos de esquerda levou a esquerda a incluir a causa palestina em sua agenda. O Brasil pode ser considerado um modelo nesse aspecto devido à influência do Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), que liderou a esquerda latino-americana após a fundação do Fórum de São Paulo em 1992. A comunidade palestina tem uma relevância ainda maior já que a perda de poder do PT favorece Israel em detrimento da causa palestina.

Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani

Reviewed by: Returning to Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani Erica Stevens Abbitt RETURNING TO HAIFA. By Ghassan Kanafani. Adapted by Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace. Directed by Caitlin McLeod. Finborough Theatre, London. March 3, 2018. The tempestuous political environment of 2018 was marked by the seventieth anniversary of what some celebrated as the founding of the state of Israel and others deplored as the Nakba (or “catastrophe”) of the Palestinian people. In this landmark year, an American stage adaptation of Returning to Haifa by the late Palestinian activist, author, and journalist Ghassan Kanafani challenged cherished assumptions about the progressive nature of contemporary US theatre. Remarkably sympathetic to both sides, Returning to Haifa was originally a novella, published a few years before Kanafani’s assassination by a car bomb in 1972. It concerns a Palestinian couple who drive across the Israeli border in 1967 searching for the home and infant son they were forced to leave behind twenty years earlier. Invited in by the elderly widow (and Holocaust survivor) who took over their property, they encounter a young man in an Israeli army uniform who embraces his Jewish identity and foster mother. The meeting is painful, awkward, and at times even humorous, but the ending seems inevitable. The couple leave Haifa without their long-lost son, wondering if the conflict will ever end. Kanafani’s story has been adapted for the stage in Denmark, Lebanon, and Israel, where the Cameri Theatre of Tel Aviv created a version in Arabic and Hebrew that toured to Theater J in Washington, D.C. In 2010, a “rogue” version in English was produced by Evanston’s Next Theatre, deepening the ethical debate on translation and the representation of Palestinian issues. American playwrights Naomi Wallace and Ismail Khalidi were granted the rights for a new adaptation by the Kanafani estate. Wallace, [End Page 106] a Kentucky-born, UK-based poet, screenwriter, and playwright, is best known for her dramas on class, war, labor, gender, and race (One Flea Spare, In the Heart of America, And I and Silence). Khalidi, a Palestinian American playwright (Tennis in Nablus, Truth Serum Blues), is currently writing works for Noor Theatre and Actors Theatre of Louisville. Click for larger view View full resolution Marlene Sidaway (Miriam), Myriam Acharki (Safiyya), and Ammar Haj Ahmad (Said) in Returning to Haifa. (Photo: Scott Rylander, courtesy of Lynne McConway Productions.) The Khalidi/Wallace version of Returning to Haifa was supported by a commission from New York’s Public Theater, where artistic director Oskar Eustis planned to direct it. After a successful reading, the production stalled in 2016, several months before the US election. According to the playwrights, although the Public cited scheduling issues, the decision was actually prompted by board members concerned with the risk of presenting a play on Palestinian themes. UK independent producer Lynne McConway and director Caitlin McLeod stepped in, offering to present the work at London’s Fin-borough Theatre, a fifty-seat venue renowned for its advocacy of contemporary British, American, and Canadian drama. For the world premiere of the newly adapted Returning to Haifa, a resourceful British team concentrated on turning the challenge of an unanticipated change of venue (and country) to advantage. Although set in the midst of large events, the play is tightly focused in scope. McLeod and her design team wisely configured the tiny space at their disposal into an inviting central area with a minimalist set (designed, along with costumes, by Rosie Elnile). Representing home, exile, and the journey in between, it was saturated by warm Mediterranean light (Joshua Gadsby) and enhanced by a soundscape evoking city and sea (David Gregory). The actors, surrounded on all sides by spectators, moved fluidly around one another in a vivid interplay between past and present (the movement director was Lanre Malaolu). Said (played by Ammar Haj Ahmad) was rumpled, charming, angry, and self-deprecating in turn. Ahmad’s virtuosity with language drove the tempo of the play, which is also about the ability (and inability) to communicate when political rhetoric encounters emotion. Said’s wife, Safiyya (Myriam Acharki), came to life in the stage version with a beautifully observed performance of a spouse sparring with her excitable husband while...

Cultural Considerations for Autonomy and Medical Adherence in a Young Palestinian American Muslim Female With Spina Bifida: A Longitudinal Case Study in a Research Context.

This case study examines the unique presentation of a young Palestinian-American Muslim female, who is a part of an ongoing longitudinal study examining family and peer relationships, psychological adjustment, and neuropsychological functioning in youth with spina bifida. Throughout ten years of data collection, Palestinian-Arab culture and Islamic faith have consistently emerged as important factors that can be considered when interpreting this participant's general level of autonomy, medical autonomy, medical adherence, and psychological adjustment. This case study examines important aspects of adaptive and independent functioning for youth with spina bifida and how this family's culture interacts with these different domains of functioning. Moreover, it explores potential conflicts between an Arab collectivist family structure and Western biomedical ethics and suggests how clinicians might navigate these conflicts and bolster culturally-rooted strengths of families and patients from non-Western backgrounds.

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s. By Enaya Hammad Othman. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2016. 242 pp. $90.00 hardback; $85.00 e-book.

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s. By Enaya Hammad Othman. Lanham: Lexington Books. 2016. 242 pp. $90.00 hardback; $85.00 e-book.

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s, by Enaya Othman

Negotiating Palestinian Womanhood: Encounters between Palestinian Women and American Missionaries, 1880s–1940s, by Enaya Othman

The Concept of ‘Home’ in Palestinian Diaspora Fiction: A Critical Study of Randa Jarrar’s Fiction

The paper discusses the concepts of ‘home’, ‘cultural identity’, and ‘transnationalism’ in Randa Jarrar’s fiction. Being a diasporic Palestinian American, Randa Jarrar in her debut novel A Map of Home presents a particular view of ‘homeland’ and of what ‘historic Palestine’ means to her. The attempt in this paper is to critically analyze her fiction and to highlight the issues that she tackles as a writer of Palestinian origin. The paper also explores the way Randa Jarrar approaches the concept of ‘home’, and an examination of the relationship between Palestinian diasporas and their homeland-Palestine is presented. There is much wandering that Randa Jarrar is experimenting with in rather a creative space, and there is also a counter-narrative ideology embedded in the novel, a way to resist the stereotypes that have fixed the Middle Eastern female body as propagated in Orientalist discourse.

Barefoot by Kevin Hart

song.” In other words, in poem after poem, even the ones seemingly abandoned to the sensual, we find a poet of remarkable depth and originality who finds in the corporeal world that which animates it and gives it meaning. Kinnell is also importantly influenced by Rilke, especially his Duino Elegies, and like Rilke he bears witness to a world that wants to be seen by us and arise again in song. Of all the poets of his generation, Kinnell is likely the most sanguine and sane, the one most exuberantly in love with life—all of it, and he embraces it all to rise again in his poems. A brief quotation of Whitman serves as an epigram to his final book: “Tenderly—be not impatient, / (Strong is your hold O mortal flesh, / Strong is your hold O love.)” In the late poem “The Stone Table,” from his last book, Strong Is Your Hold, Kinnell writes: “I, who so often used to wish to float free / of earth, now with all my being want to stay,” and I suspect that he will stay, an undefeated spirit in the enduring body of his collected words. Fred Dings University of South Carolina Kevin Hart Barefoot Notre Dame, Indiana. University of Notre Dame Press. 2018. 92 pages. In Kevin Hart’s eighth book of poetry, he uses poetry to talk to the absent or, rather, the ambiguously present: his late father, God, past lovers, and versions of himself. Barefoot begins with elegies for the poet’s father (see WLT, Nov. 2017, 61). Hart movingly explores the way that his father, unknowable now in death, was unknowable in life. Death highlights the inscrutability of our parents. “I hear the silence of two crows // Then look down at my arm: / Not even your shadow’s there to touch,” he writes in “Little Book of Mourning .” In “Eclipse,” he asks, “Where are you, father, in these ragged hours?” This sense of distance, however, doesn’t preclude tenderness , as in the title poem, in which the poet creates an inversion of Dylan Thomas ’s famous plea: “Don’t sleep tonight, dear father, darkness eats // Shadows and men alive, just walk barefoot / Into that other world.” Many of the volume’s most striking lines are from this emotionally charged section of the book. In “Again,” he speaks of “mosquito gangs / Falsettoing in hot, dark rooms at night.” The vivid images and imaginative phrasing are a testimony to the authenticity of feeling. As is often the case, everything Hart says about his earthly father seems to apply also to his Heavenly Father. Beginning with the opening villanelle and continuing throughout, Hart addresses God as “Dark One,” a phrase that evokes the tradition of “negative theology,” which has roots deep in the Christian tradition and thinks about God in terms of what He is not, emphasizing the mysterious, the unknowable nature of the divine. In “Little Songbook of the Dark One,” Hart writes, “All afternoon, my scalene heart, Dark One, / My mind runs and clatters after you, / And then all night the wild track of your love.” Like many mystics before him, Hart often speaks of the divine in erotic terms. In the same poem he says, “Yet when I watch the rain, Dark One, I’m home, / And when we touch, I also touch the rain.” “It’s not too late, Dark One,” he later pleads in a poem called “Prayer,” “For you to come / And hold me close / And stay an hour or two[.]” Later, when the book turns to frankly erotic earthbound love poems, the holiness of the erotic mysticism is carried over, creating engagingly sacramental love poems. Benjamin Myers Oklahoma Baptist University Fady Joudah Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance Minneapolis. Milkweed Editions. 2018. 84 pages. Footnotes in the Order of Disappearance progresses through gradual inoculation. Bit by bit, the reader becomes accustomed to the irony and paradox with which Palestinian American poet, translator, and physician Fady Joudah works. Joudah writes with a “fever,” crafting a dense lyricism that forces the reader to become a “footnoter ,” inking the margins with glosses to his medical metaphors. Tracing the smoke trails of philological, global, and personal themes across the...

Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British LiteratureContemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British LiteratureContemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging

Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer: Affect as a Critical Optic

Reviewed by: Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer Alexander Cho (bio) Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer. New York University Press. 2016. $89.00 hardcover; $30.00 paperback; $20.39 e-book. 288 pages. Halfway through anthropologist Su'ad Abdul Khabeer's Muslim Cool, the author tells a first-person story of going to a "girl party" in a Chicago suburb. This is a house party exclusively for Muslim women and girls at which they can "let their hair out (or down), literally and figuratively, in an all-female environment," socialize, and dance.1 As she and her friend get into the groove and belly dance, she slowly realizes that their hostess, a Palestinian Muslim immigrant mother, and the other girls, all Palestinian American Muslims, have stopped dancing and are simply gazing at her and her friend, fascinated by "the 'spectacle' of the two dancing (Black) girls."2 Khabeer, troubled by this sudden atmospheric shift in what is supposed to be a space of equality, quickly exits the dance floor. This gaze of difference informs one of the core projects of Muslim Cool: to interrogate the alterity of Black Islam within the "ethnoreligious hegemony" of contemporary US Muslim identity.3 However, this is only one part of Khabeer's thesis on the exchange and interplay of race, religion, and culture. Her companion observations are, not coincidentally, as follows: Black hip-hop music and culture function as vehicles for young Muslims to realize and own their religious identity; hip-hop music and culture itself came of age vis-à-vis a relationship to Black Islam; and a current stylistic amalgamation of Blackness and Islam, which she calls "Muslim Cool," is the result of this loop, fed back upon itself, a living, breathing instance of agentic resistance to hegemonic pressures via a cultivated style.4 Her project is less to surgically isolate ownership of any particular cultural form and more to map a [End Page 182] complex cultural landscape of power and exchange, following paths and hints where they may lead in fine ethnographic detail. Khabeer's fieldwork is based on multiple years as an observer, organizer, advocate, and activist at Chicago's Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN). As a reflexive anthropologist, Khabeer radically locates herself—Black, Latina, and Muslim—in her observations. She's also a self-proclaimed "hip-hop head," and many of her sites of inquiry involve the Chicago hip-hop scene. Chapters are organized as follows: an introduction to the flows of the argument behind "Muslim Cool"; specific attention to raced and religious musical practices surrounding hip-hop; attention to the radical potential of personal dress for both Black Muslim women (the "'hoodjab") and men (the "Muslim dandy"); and a chapter on the United States' exporting of Muslim Cool as neoliberal state apparatus abroad. The book concludes with an appended discussion of the place of Muslim Cool in the context of #BlackLivesMatter, which she regards as a project cut from the selfsame cloth. She writes: "Muslim Cool is a way of being Muslim that draws on Blackness to contest two overlapping systems of racial norms: the hegemonic ethnoreligious norms of Arab and South Asian US American Muslim communities on the one hand, and White American normativity on the other."5 The work is sound and compelling. Media studies folks—or anyone else interested in the interplay of race, power, and popular culture—will especially find chapter 1, "The Loop of Muslim Cool: Black Islam, Hip Hop, and Knowledge of Self," to be a master class in ethnography, media consumption and production practices, and identity making, all the while hewing tightly to a situatedness in terms of structural oppression and historical context. To call this simply a hip-hop "audience" or "reception" study would be to diminish its heft and scope. It is, rather, a formidable rumination on the evolution and meaning of a cultural form in a specific ethnoreligious context. Thankfully, Khabeer explodes any simple critical application of "appropriation"—that increasingly useless blunt instrument—and instead elegantly charts what she calls the loop of cultural relationships from Islam...

Six Poems

WORLDLIT.ORG 23 moments capturing convergence in divergence, the dance of the “contraries,” bringing together science and art, politics and spirituality, geography and history, East and West, led me to explore cosmopolitanism at the root of the ghazal form. Cosmopolitanism is defined in the dictionary as “being free from local, provincial, or national ideas, prejudices, or attachments; at home all over the world”; it is necessarily an active appreciation of disparate entities , a rejection of narrow constructs of identities, in fact, a rejection of all strictures; it is an ownership as well as a divestment. It celebrates pluralism as fiercely as it forges an autonomous voice. The ghazal, in its structure as well as its sensibility, not only allows contraries to cohabit but, in the best compositions, makes a demand to frame polarity in the same space. Once the matla, the opening couplet, introduces the refrain (or radif), the reader expects two things: one, that each successive couplet will be locked in by the same phrase/word/image of the radif, and two, that a wild freedom of perspective will be offered like a new puzzle piece that astonishes by fitting the given radif as perfectly as the previous one. The two scenes above provide a launching point for this discussion on the ghazal’s cosmopolitanism because I see the concerns of the classical ghazal enacted in them. And ghazal is nothing if not performative, a collaboration of sorts with the mushai’ra audience: another facet of its cosmopolitanism. Azra Raza, director of the MDS Center at Columbia University and coauthor of Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, appears to me to enact the ghazal by paying tribute to both Einstein and Ghalib, two great people from different parts of the world, engaged in radically different enterprises , who would have completely understood each other’s urgent desire to reach an unnervingly elegant question through boldly exercising the imagination, who were not only unafraid of polarities but found meaning in placing polarities in close proximity to each other. Marilyn Hacker, long and deeply invested in a poetics of challenging dichotomies, appears to do the same by combining diverse gestures, merely out of habit; volume after volume of her poetry and translations , from earlier works to the more recent Names and Diaspo/Renga (co-authored with the Palestinian American poet Deema Shehabi), offer us insights into how to grow a robust, original thought in the thinnest cracks of established order. The ghazal registers order, follows it, and revels in agitating it—a kind of duende in its genetic code. Six Poems by Shadab Zeest Hashmi Qasida of the Bridge of Teacups The soul cleaves into two somewhere along the birth canal, didn’t you say, Plato? I send your echo back to Athens from my rug of locked antlers in Peshawar where I fill a teacup with the question of half my soul (as I watercolor a whitewashed village I’ve yet to see). In the torpor of the mango season, I am closer to the heady basil that fishermen of the Black Sea put in their boats for luck – Will I know my soul by the musk of tannin ink, sugarcane pulp, sweat of a calligrapher’s palm? The antlers are fading. From teacups of clay, bison bone, crystal, bamboo, I build a bridge to the other half. Qasida of Tea, the Daughter of Remorse Sit, I am your powdered throne, so says dust, let my busy worm-teeth suture your folly, let remorse float in your bowl as a tea leaf, let it dissolve your delusions. Hear the wood-fire-crackle of stubborn bones under the golden whisper of tea? The emperor, an outcast, bows to his only brother – the bowl, drinking water bewitched by jasmine: a slow brew coloring realization a hint from the wind to the outcast’s hill Qasida of the Fifty-foot Tea Bush The poet’s divan, his only piece of furniture, pushed against the ecstasy of the window, bears the weight of his longing for the beloved to appear. Ah Fanny! Even a tea bush in Assam knows his secret, has shot up to a bewildering height throwing a gentle shade over the flame of his...

Unsettled belonging: educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11

Unsettled belonging: educating Palestinian American youth after 9/11

Travel, Relationality and Privilege in Palestinian American Poetry

Negotiating location, identity, and class, the poetry of Palestinian American writers Nathalie Handal and Naomi Shihab Nye projects relational models of travel to fashion forms of resistance to colonialism, imperialism, and systemic violence. As such, the poets’ travel experiences mediate a revaluation of identity away from discourses of essentialism and in terms of struggle. On a first level, the depiction of travel reflects an agential literary practice in its elaboration of a poetics of relationality with colonized communities. This poetics challenges hegemonic modes of being and compartmentalization informing mainstream politics and narratives of modernity and progress. Travel also functions on a different level: it serves as a vehicle to complicate modes of relationality and problematize their interaction with class and privilege. This representational gesture tests the limits of coalitional practices and emphasizes the importance of examining issues of privilege as they relate to cross-ethnic relations.

Space, Mobility, and Agency in Palestinian American Poetry

This article proposes a framework for exploring the role of mobility in the rearticulation of agency relating to white and minority identities in poems by Lisa Suhair Majaj, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Suheir Hammad. In this context, we show how the political poetry of Majaj, Hammad, and Nye employs mobility to destabilize racialized structures and definitions underlying ethnic and white identities and challenge the invisibility of related power hierarchies and hegemonic discursive formations. Through translational representations of mobility, we argue, the poets and poetic subjects unmask racialized locations and map transformative itineraries shaped by choice and affiliation; the resulting identities are constantly negotiated and reshaped in relation to struggle, justice, and global concerns. The examination of mobility in this context also reveals the conditions of existence and circulation of white privilege to unmask its influence on ascriptions of human value and worth.

The Knowledge by Robert Peake

Amjad Nasser. Petra: The Concealed Rose. Fady Joudah, tr. Portland, Oregon. Tavern Books. 2014. isbn 9781935635406 Petra is a beautiful hand-sewn chapbook whose text is set in handsome Garamond typeface printed on archival-quality paper and published as a small paperback of thirty -two pages. It offers a poetic translation of Amjad Nasser’s Arabic prose lyric on Petra, the Nabataean city about which the English Anglican clergyman John William Burgon (1813–1888) wrote a prizewinning poem in 1845, in which he famously said it was “a red-rose city half as old as time.” More recently, in February 2015 a PBS special on Nova entitled “Petra, Lost City of Stone,” showed the ever-fascinating historic remains of this enchanting caravan city of Hellenic-Roman times in present-day Jordan , its gracious temples elegantly carved in the cliffs, its inhabitants’ abodes hewn in the rock, and their tombs. Nasser, born in Jordan in 1955, is a London-based poet with nine collections of poetry, four lyric travel memoirs, and one novel. His works have been translated from Arabic into several languages. In addition, he has been a journalist throughout his career. In his prose lyric on Petra, delicately translated by award-winning Palestinian American poet Fady Joudah, he evokes the city’s beauty and history in his unique style of travel memoir. Unknown to the modern Western world until 1812, when rediscovered by Swiss explorer Johann Ludwig Burckhardt, Petra can now be rediscovered by readers of this prose lyric and enjoyed in verbal delights. Nasser begins Petra: The Concealed Rose with the stupefaction of visitors on first seeing Petra’s beauty: “We know you’re hiding there / behind that rib cage of a guard. / Breathing with the mountain’s lungs and watching, / through the rock’s sunken secret, / comers and goers who are seduced by descriptive talk, / before silence stamps its lilac seal on their lips.” And he proceeds to a detailed description of what the Bedouins knew and appreciated before Burckhardt ever learned of the “concealed wonder,” disbelieving their talk about it like typical Orientalists who disparage local informants. Nasser later acknowledges Burckhardt’s courage and curiosity and thanks him not because he “discovered” Petra’s beauty but because it shook him and made him talk about it as though hallucinating. The prose lyric then leads the reader through the city’s splendid remains to marvel at al-Khazneh and the other radiant carved monuments and to learn about the Nabataean deities and myths. A dreamlike world of what is seen evokes Sufi experiences of beauty, love, and unity where “Nothing overpowers another. Here balance is just.” True to its principles, Tavern Books has offered in this translation an innovative writer and a new vision and voice. Issa J. Boullata McGill University Robert Peake. The Knowledge. Rugby, England. Nine Arches Press. 2015. isbn 9780993120114 Any discussion of differences between American and British poetry begins and ends with the fact that we hardly ever read each other. Why that is so is anybody’s guess, though the sheer amount, not to mention plurality, of poetry books published in both countries can occupy even the most generous and outward-looking readers for years. Indeed, Americans don’t read British poetry because we barely keep up with our own scribblers, while the British—one can’t be faulted for recalling—are doing their best to protect local talent. Needless to say, this defensive justification is part of the problem—there is much fine poetry to be enjoyed on both sides of the pond. The days when one feared losing a sense of direction or identity because of a few well-chosen books are long gone, alas. Nevertheless, the idea of knowing one’s place, within and without, sits at the forefront of Robert Peake’s fine debut full-length collection. This British-American poet’s talent for detail and tonal coloring was already on display in his Poetry Salzburg chapbook, which came out in 2013 and was dedicated to eulogizing Peake’s infant son, but it is only now that we can enjoy the full reach of his poetic skill. Some readers may find The Knowledge slightly overwritten, but that is...