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Rooted Movements

The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space
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Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive sense of rootedness, sustained and nurtured by a deep care for land stewardship and embedded in a spatialized history. In Rooted Movements, Amanda Batarseh examines the epistemology of Palestinian Indigeneity based in a radical relationship to place. Against a colonial logic that often centers displacement as the chief lens through which to understand Palestinian connection to place and spatialized existence, Batarseh argues that Palestinian literature poses Indigeneity as a dialectic relying as much upon rootedness as on ideas of movement. In elaborating this tension, Batarseh develops a methodology of reading Palestinian literature that foregrounds how Palestinians negotiate space and removal through liberatory mobilization and not as a symptom of zionist, colonial violence. Reading the poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, novels, and films of writers in Palestine and in exile-from Ghassan Kanafani to Naomi Shihab Nye, Hussein Barghouthi, Raja Shehadeh, Ibtisam Azem, and Randa Jarrar-she exposes the limitations of focusing on the geopolitical borders of a modern nation-state and offers alternative imaginaries not bound by colonial spatial control. Instead, the Palestinian poetics of space Batarseh articulates engage rooted movement as an Indigenous expression of deep-seated and enduring connections to place. Palestine, this place, is not static, enclosed by military boundaries, or frozen in time before or after the Nakba, but generative and looking toward a Palestinian future.
Amanda Batarseh is an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where her research and teaching focus on Palestinian literature with a broader focus on Arab cultural production in and outside of Arabic, Indigenous studies, and Mediterranean studies.
"Batarseh offers an original and innovative analysis that will have a profound impact on the way we understand Palestinian society and culture." -Steven Salaita, author of Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine "Among the most outstanding works on Palestinian literature." -Joseph R. Farag, author of Politics and Palestinian Literature in Exile: Gender, Aesthetics and Resistance in the Short Story
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