A01=Rana Barakat
Author_Rana Barakat
belonging
Category=JBSL11
Category=NHG
culture
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_new_release
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
everyday
heritage
imagining
Jerusalem
landscape
Lifta
listening
memory
museumification
nakba
occupation
ongoing nakba
ongoing return
Palestine
PLO (Palestine Liberation Organization)
protection
refugee
relationality
remembering
repair
resistance
return
ruins
settler violence
settler-colonialism
storytelling
territory
walking
West Back
Product details
- ISBN 9781469680293
- Dimensions: 25 x 235mm
- Publication Date: 03 Mar 2026
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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In Palestine, a walk across the landscape is a journey of return that defies time, layered with sediments of personal experience and collective peoplehood. For Palestinian scholar Rana Barakat, the experience of place is guided by the stories and memories of her grandmother, who was among the 750,000 people forcibly displaced in 1948 by the newly formed Israeli government. Since then, the violence of settler colonialism has actively prevented the return of Palestinian refugees, including those from Lifta, her family's ancestral village. In the present, the settler state of Israel seems to control the fate of the remaining structures in Lifta, enforcing so-called development plans that limit access and leave the valley appearing frozen in time. By gathering stories from family and community members alongside archival sources and lived experience in the West Bank under Israeli occupation, however, Barakat reveals the way storytelling provides a form of ongoing return to a once-thriving village and to Palestine itself.
One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Barakat offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and lives today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.
One of the first books to position Palestinian studies within Indigenous studies, Barakat offers a rich perspective on Palestinian history and lives today. Embedded in a deeply personal journey, Ongoing Return takes the reader through the past via the present and dares to imagine futures for Palestine and its people.
Rana Barakat is associate professor of history at Birzeit University and director of the Birzeit University Museum.
