Books
Books
Sa’ed Atshan & Katharina Galor
Reel Gender is a groundbreaking collection that addresses the collective realities and the filmic representations of Palestinian and Israeli societies. The eight essays, by leading scholars, demonstrate how Palestinian and Israeli film production-despite obvious overlaps and similarities and while keeping in mind the inherent asymmetry of power dynamics-are at the forefront of engaging gender and sexuality. The scholars of this volume construct and deconstruct still and moving images, characters, and stories that create an entanglement of Palestinian and Israeli cinema. Together they portray the region’s diverse but unexpectedly intermingled ethnic, religious, and national communities, framed or countered by various societal norms, laws, and expectations, while also defined by colonial realities. The essays draw methodologically from the fields of media and cultural studies, critical and postcolonial theory, feminism, post-feminism, and queer theory.
“Without losing sight of the ‘inherent asymmetry of power dynamics,’ Reel Gender projects the entanglement of Palestine/Israel for us to see. Against the backdrop of settler colonialism and through the lens of gender which puts power and inequality in focus, Atshan and Galor bravely invite their contributors and readers to a difficult and necessary conversation about the making of fiction and reality.” — Huda J. Fakhreddine, Associate Professor of Arabic Literature, University of Pennsylvania, USA
“A double lens on Israeli and Palestinian film, 2 distinctive yet enmeshed sets of films addressing contemporary connundra of gender, sexuality, and identity in a desperate, yet vital world inhabited so differently by both, yet with similar anxieties and to a degree, aspirations. The book begins with a superb introduction by the pair of editors, one Israeli the other Palestinian, and is followed by trenchant and interesting studies by top scholars. This book is a must for anyone wishing to decipher the complex double reality of Israel/Palestine.” — Daniel Herwitz, Frederick G. L. Huetwell Professor, Comparative Literature, Philosophy and History of Art, University of Michigan, USA
Sa’ed Atshan
From Ramallah to New York, Tel Aviv to Porto Alegre, people around the world celebrate a formidable, transnational Palestinian LGBTQ social movement. Solidarity with Palestinians has become a salient domain of global queer politics. Yet LGBTQ Palestinians, even as they fight patriarchy and imperialism, are themselves subjected to an “empire of critique” from Israeli and Palestinian institutions, Western academics, journalists and filmmakers, and even fellow activists. Such global criticism has limited growth and led to an emphasis within the movement on anti-imperialism over the struggle against homophobia.
With this book, Sa’ed Atshan asks how transnational progressive social movements can balance struggles for liberation along more than one axis. He explores critical junctures in the history of Palestinian LGBTQ activism, revealing the queer Palestinian spirit of agency, defiance, and creativity, in the face of daunting pressures and forces working to constrict it. Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique explores the necessity of connecting the struggles for Palestinian freedom with the struggle against homophobia.
“This powerful and prophetic book shows that the struggle for justice and freedom against empire and homophobia are indivisible. Sa’ed Atshan’s text is a major intellectual force for good.”
—Cornel West, Harvard University
“This utterly brilliant book will be a classic. Sa’ed Atshan’s comprehensive study of queer Palestinian activism provides a rich understanding of the complex intersections of selfhood, activism, and belonging. By demonstrating the limits of binarisms of East/West and self/other through detailed empirical analysis and powerful theoretical interventions, Atshan has given us a landmark work valuable to Middle East studies, queer studies, and anthropology in the broadest sense.”
—Tom Boellstorff, University of California, Irvine, author of The Gay Archipelago: Sexuality and Nation in Indonesia
“Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is a breath of fresh air! In the academic climate in which ‘radical’ has become synonymous with crude schisms between West and East, authentic and inauthentic, pure and sellout, this book provides a much-needed nuanced account of Queer Palestine. Sa’ed Atshan carefully historicizes the local terrain and rightly problematizes how US-based scholarship has turned the critique of empire into an empire of critique. This is a brilliant call for academic self-reflection and a brave rejection of so-called radical myths of cultural authenticity.”
—Gil Z. Hochberg, Columbia University
“Sa’ed Atshan brilliantly weaves together ethnography and personal experience in the most thoughtful, engaging, and emotionally captivating ways. His sophisticated work captures the nexus of a scholar-activist, offering an authoritative account of the challenges and trajectory of the Palestinian LGBTQ movement. A tour de force and a remarkable book for both its theoretical and empirical contributions.”
—Amaney A. Jamal, Princeton University
“In Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique, Sa’ed Atshan provides a brilliant theorization of an excessive mode of political critique that strives for the high ground yet contributes to the calcification of social justice movements. Through a nuanced ethnography that foregrounds the plurality of queer experience in Israel and Palestine and the enormous complexity of the global Palestinian solidarity movement, Atshan demonstrates how an intellectual stance that combines a conviction of the moral superiority of one’s political judgments with deep suspicion concerning others’ complicity in relations of domination and the likely oppressive consequences of prescriptions for social transformation engenders discursive disenfranchisement, loss of key intellectual distinctions, neglect of pragmatic constraints, demoralization of activists, and the truncation of transnational queer solidarity. This deeply insightful book makes vital contributions to Queer Studies, Middle East Studies, Social Movement Studies, and an understanding of the dynamics of social justice praxis.”
—Mary Hawkesworth, Rutgers University
“Atshan’s book, an autoethnography of queer Palestine, is methodologically impeccable, incorporating academic work and personal positioning. He advances a philosophy of critique centered on the everyday material lives of people, that is both complex and masterfully written. He makes a bold and thought-provoking argument—one that speaks to social justice activists as well as academics.”
—2020 Lee Ann Fujii Book Award Committee, International Studies Association
“[A] timely and urgent account….Along with a succinct presentation of the immense challenges faced by the LGBTQ-identifying Palestinians, Atshan highlights Palestinian agency, ingenuity, and resilience.”
—Joshua Donova, New Books Network
“[Atshan] immaculately illustrates the development of movements along with the challenges they face by both conservative Palestinians and Arabs at large and by the repressive occupation. This work is pioneering and fills a significant gap within Middle East Studies.”
—Lana Shehadeh, Arab Studies Quarterly
“The goal of Atshan’s sensitive ‘critique of critique’ is fostering a ‘transforming activism with loving energy’ that helps the Palestinian LGBTQ movement start to grow again and reach its full potential. His long-term hope is ‘that Israelis and Palestinians, straight and queer, can all live together as equals.’ My hope is that all Friends will seek to find ways to help achieve this healing vision.”
—Steve Chase, Friends Journal
“Atshan’s work, in describing the empire of critique surrounding the queer Palestinian experience, demonstrates the highly politicised nature of certain rights and their potential to be weaponised in order to subvert the gaze from other issues. Furthermore, through his analysis of the heterogeneity of narratives surrounding this liberation movement, he reminds us that the voices of those that exist at these intersections of oppressions should and must be the loudest.”
—Iona Cable, Human Rights Pulse
“Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique is a much-needed contribution to queer studies, Middle East studies, and scholarship on social movements and a must-read for those who are committed to the difficult politics of solidarity.”
—Evren Savci, Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies
“This is a most timely and admirably courageous book that challenges the seeming gap between queer activism and anthropology…Atshan shows that anthropology has the potential to support local activist struggles against homophobia and imperialism by rigorously engaging with, rather than dismissing, the experiences and views of these activists—their simultaneous engagement with multiple axes of oppression.”
—2021 Ruth Benedict Book Prize Committee, Association for Queer Anthropology
“Atshan makes a major contribution to the study of social movements generally and the queer Palestinian movement specifically. Atshan conceptually explores resistance and identity in the context of Israeli and Palestinian conflict. He offers an empirically rich and compelling account, where readers are let into the everyday life of the global queer Palestinian solidarity movement.”
—Sara Salman, Contemporary Sociology
“The nature of life under colonisation and occupation, in Atshan’s view, means that no one, not even ‘the most radical activists and academics’, can lay claim to the moral high ground. Everyone is implicated in some way. It’s better to edge forward in modest ways.”
—Tareq Baconi, London Review of Books
“[Atshan’s] work fills gaps and addresses the silences and deliberate erasures in Palestine studies, Middle East studies, Middle East anthropology, queer theories, and peace and conflict studies, showing how ‘queer liberation cannot be realized while colonial subjugation persists,’ because these struggles are ‘inextricably linked’ (p. 222). Scholars and students engaged in Israel/Palestine and settler colonial struggles will benefit from this auto/ethnographic text of subjectivities on the ground.”
—Bernardita Maria Yunis Varas, International Journal of Communication
“Atshan’s work is candid, self-critical, and unexpectedly inspiring.”
—Lisa Anderson, Foreign Affairs
“[Atshan’s] book is the culmination, at least for now, of his years-long effort to persuade his activist community to simultaneously oppose Israeli rule and Palestinian homophobia, and not privilege the one over the other… Atshan’s book is a trenchant clarion call, harnessed to the words of the iconic African American poet Audre Lorde: ‘there is no hierarchy of oppressions.'”
—Abe Silberstein, The Tel Aviv Review of Books
Sa’ed Atshan & Katharina Galor
Berlin is home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora community and one of the world’s largest Israeli diaspora communities. Germany’s guilt about the Nazi Holocaust has led to a public disavowal of anti-Semitism and strong support for the Israeli state. Meanwhile, Palestinians in Berlin report experiencing increasing levels of racism and Islamophobia. In The Moral Triangle Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor draw on ethnographic fieldwork and interviews with Israelis, Palestinians, and Germans in Berlin to explore these asymmetric relationships in the context of official German policies, public discourse, and the private sphere. They show how these relationships stem from narratives surrounding moral responsibility, the Holocaust, the Israel/Palestine conflict, and Germany’s recent welcoming of Middle Eastern refugees. They also point to spaces for activism and solidarity among Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians in Berlin that can help foster restorative justice and account for multiple forms of trauma. Highlighting their interlocutors’ experiences, memories, and hopes, Atshan and Galor demonstrate the myriad ways in which migration, trauma, and contemporary state politics are inextricably linked.
“Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor are engaged in rich and rare dialogues—with each other and their informants—that redefine the ‘moral triangle’ between Palestinians, Jews, and Germans as they act, react, interact, resist, and reconcile in Berlin. In a spirit of affective affiliation they draw on psychic compulsions and political circumstances that haunt the histories of cohabitation. Survival, trauma, grace, forgiveness, desperation, and hospitality are issues that stir the conscience and consciousness of this remarkable book. The Moral Triangle exceeds its geometry to provide a many-sided, plural perspective on living together in difference with dignity.” — Homi K. Bhabha, Anne F Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University
“The Moral Triangle takes up one of the most complex topics in the contemporary world: the ethically fraught relationships between Germans, Israelis, and Palestinians. But Sa’ed Atshan and Katharina Galor’s book is also much more than an original and urgently needed study; it is itself an ethical document that exemplifies how scholarship can confront thorny moral and political problems with generosity, nuance, and a strong sense of restorative justice. This uniquely powerful book will make a significant and salutary intervention for both academic and general readerships.” — Michael Rothberg, author of The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators
Sa’ed Atshan & Katharina Galor