Amanda Batarseh
University of California, San Diego, Literature, Faculty Member
- Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego.edit
In the early-twentieth century, Palestinian physician and ethnographer Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the fellaheen... more
In the early-twentieth century, Palestinian physician and ethnographer
Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and
narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the
fellaheen (peasantry). In this article, the author examines how Canaan’s
expansive collection of stories related to holy sites across Palestine in
Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. In
so doing, she contends that Canaan both contests orientalist constructions
of the Holy Land as frozen in biblical time and, critically, unsettles the very
spatiotemporal logic governing dominant colonial narrations of place. This
epistemic shift, the author concludes, is the result of Canaan’s recentering
of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and
method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable
within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries
that have so far circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work.
Tawfiq Canaan published roughly forty-five studies on the cultural and
narrative traditions of the largest section of Palestinian society, the
fellaheen (peasantry). In this article, the author examines how Canaan’s
expansive collection of stories related to holy sites across Palestine in
Mohammedan Saints and Sanctuaries in Palestine (1927) produces a provocative literary cartography—a narrative that operates much like a map. In
so doing, she contends that Canaan both contests orientalist constructions
of the Holy Land as frozen in biblical time and, critically, unsettles the very
spatiotemporal logic governing dominant colonial narrations of place. This
epistemic shift, the author concludes, is the result of Canaan’s recentering
of Indigenous Palestinian place-based knowledge as both the subject and
method of his study. This approach offers instructive lessons applicable
within and beyond the disciplinary, regional, and temporal boundaries
that have so far circumscribed the study and reception of Canaan’s work.
Research Interests:
Early-twentieth-century Palestinian ethnographer, Tawfiq Canaan, reflects in his posthumously published autobiography that a “love of the countryside and the fellah [peasantry]” was instilled in him from a young age. As an adult, Canaan... more
Early-twentieth-century Palestinian ethnographer, Tawfiq Canaan, reflects in his posthumously published autobiography that a “love of the countryside and the fellah [peasantry]” was instilled in him from a young age. As an adult, Canaan negotiated the parameters of Orientalist Romantic discourse immanent to the ethnographic field in which he produced his work through this “love” of the “fellah.” Interrogating Canaan’s Romanticism exposes how he countered Palestinian erasure by mobilizing the discourse familiar to his target Western audience, and through this translation process, how a genre of Palestinian Romanticism emerged.
Research Interests:
Originally scheduled for March 2020, the first Palestine Writes Literature Festival was held virtually in December 2020. The festival brought together authors, artists, activists, scholars, and publishers, offering a dynamic environment... more
Originally scheduled for March 2020, the first Palestine Writes Literature Festival was held virtually in December 2020. The festival brought together authors, artists, activists, scholars, and publishers, offering a dynamic environment for attendees to reimagine the space and time of Palestine, foregrounding Palestinian presence in the past, present, and future. The festival's aim "to imagine a world we want" asserts the centrality of Palestinian political futurity-the liberation of Palestinian imagination from the confines of settler colonial space-time that presents itself as natural, neutral, and permanent. Drawing participants from across multiple regions, languages, and artistic genres, the festival disrupted the ostensible boundaries and binaries of Palestinian writing (inside/outside; Arabic/non-Arabic; literary/non-literary, etc.). The broadening of the Palestinian canon to include non-Arabic writing by exilic authors, however, also provokes the demand to protect against the potential compression of Palestinian identity into a narrative of diasporic "statelessness." In this review, Amanda Batarseh interrogates what it means for Palestine Writes to imagine Palestinian futurity when those voices doing the imagining are dispersed and subject to varying degrees of censure and threat.
Research Interests:
In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan'an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the... more
In the 1920s, the Palestinian ethnographer Tawfiq Kan'an examined the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space by cataloguing the living archive of Palestinian sanctuaries. His collection of narratives, imbued in the sacred space of the "shrine, tomb, tree, shrub, cave, spring, well, rock [or] stone" is suggestive of cultural anthropologist Keith Basso's elaboration of "place-making" as learned from the Western Apache. Articulating two modes of disruption, place-making narratives preserve indigenous culture in the face of colonial conquest and unsettle colonial paradigms of spatial belonging and exclusion. Despite the efforts of settler colonial erasure, this interpolative practice has been carried through Palestinian narrative traditions into the present. Raja Shehadeh's Palestinian Walks: Notes on a Vanishing Landscape (2007) illustrates an indigenous mode of seeing, creating, and contesting spatial narratives, disclosing the role of place-making in contemporary Palestinian literature.
Research Interests:
Examining the role of secular and religious folklore in the rural life of Palestinians between 1900 and 1948, one scholar writes, "every countryman was a narrator." The deep narrative sedimentation of folklore is an enduring... more
Examining the role of secular and religious folklore in the rural life of Palestinians between 1900 and 1948, one scholar writes, "every countryman was a narrator." The deep narrative sedimentation of folklore is an enduring characteristic of Palestinian culture. One indication of this is evinced by Palestinian toponymy. The town of Bethlehem has been ascribed with multiple etymologies from the Cana'anite god of fertility, lahm, to an Aramaic derivation possibly meaning house of sheep, suggesting the region's association with agrarian livelihood. Bethlehem's ambiguous and layered etymology illuminates the physical and narrative construction of Palestinian space in a cultural phenomenon described by Keith Basso as the place-making of Indigenous place-worlds. Bethlehem's place-worlds are characterized by the permeability of Eastern Mediterranean narrative traditions, which transcend ostensible religious barriers and are embedded in the indigenous population's land practices. In this paper, I deploy narrative permeability as a framework for examining how holy sites dedicated to Mary in Bethlehem express Indigenous "grammars of place." These spontaneous sites offer a form of topographical resistance to settler erasure, expressing a sociocultural and religious history that, while resonating with Muslim and Christian sacred texts, constitute autonomous, Indigenous narrative practices that are textually unbound and preserved over centuries through the observation of practices on and with the land.
Research Interests:
Canto XXIII marks a tragicomic turning point in the Orlando Furioso, as the tension sustaining the titular character’s epic stoicism and romantic chivalry falls away to reveal a maniacal anti-hero. This canto’s staging of Orlando’s... more
Canto XXIII marks a tragicomic turning point in the Orlando Furioso, as the tension sustaining the titular character’s epic stoicism and romantic chivalry falls away to reveal a maniacal anti-hero. This canto’s staging of Orlando’s madness signals a significant extra-textual literary transition, unsettling the binary of medieval and classical literary traditions that Ariosto draws on, and suggesting a novel genre of literary expression. This article explores one avenue by which Ariosto disrupts such ostensible polarities through the dynamic intertextual practice of writing and rewriting the “Orient.” A close reading of Canto XXVIII’s resounding echoes of the Thousand and One Nights’ and the lesser-known Hundred and One Nights’ frame tales, illuminates the Furioso’s double focus upon movement toward and away from Muslim-Arab cultural affiliation, a push-pull that opens a space of difference where literary traditions can converge neither in reconciliation nor domination of one another. In particular, this paper examines how Ariosto’s poem captures the ambiguous hybridity of the medieval Mediterranean as an ever-shifting terrain defined not only by oppositionality and hostility, but also by curiosity, exchange, and alliance.