People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel
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€19.99
Adab al-Sha?b
al-Ittihad
al-Jadid
Anticolonial
Category=DNT
Category=JPWQ
displacement
Emile Habiby
eq_anthologies-novellas-short-stories
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_fiction
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
forthcoming
Hana Ibrahim
Israel
Jabra Nicola
Nakba
occupation
Palestine
Sami Michael
Shimon Ballas
socialist movements
Socialist Writing
Tawfiq Zayyad
Product details
- ISBN 9781399564762
- Dimensions: 138 x 216mm
- Publication Date: 31 Jul 2026
- Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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For the first time in English translation, A People’s Literature in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing after 1948 brings together stories, poems, and essays by Palestinian and Arab Jewish intellectuals who created a shared anti-Zionist literary movement after the Nakba and the establishment of Israel in 1948. At the heart of the movement was Adab al-Sha'b ('A People's Literature'), popular writing-from-below published in the Communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad. Located in prisons, border villages, transit camps and Palestinian areas under military rule, these works capture the linked struggles of Palestinians, Arab Jews, and Left organisers during the 1950s and early 1960s.
This collection shares intimate and imaginative histories of everyday life under occupation and displacement. Personal accounts of partition, ethnic cleansing and expulsion of village communities, and colonial policies in the transit camps reflect an early alternative history to Zionism.
Stories of border murders, strikes, covert action, organising and solidarity link local struggles to global anticolonial and socialist movements. Writers including Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Hana Ibrahim, Shimon Ballas and Jabra Nicola, all included in this anthology, drew inspiration from socialist realism and the currents of Third World liberation from Egypt to Vietnam to reimagine literature as a form of radical history and imagination.
Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Global South and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. She is the author of Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print, editor of A People’s Literature of Palestine/Israel: An Anthology of Anticolonial and Socialist Writing (both Edinburgh University Press, 2026), and has published articles in in Journal of Levantine Studies, Modernism/modernity and Radical History Review. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration on 20th-century anticolonial and anti-imperial periodicals. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces and cultures destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.
