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List of contents
Acknowledgements
Once Upon an Intifada
At the Edge of Known Stories
Field Sites and Fault Lines
Story against Narrative
Young People as Storytellers
Language and the Hidden Landscape
Fairy Tale as an Idiom of Terror
A Lexicon of Symbols
Mother Tongues and Other Tongues
Violence in the Narration of Self and Other
Face to Face: the Fundamental Violence of Storytelling
Storytelling as Self-Expression and Suppression
Purity in Narrative? Storytelling as Transgression
“What Do They Tell About Us?”
Forbidden Histories in Contested Spaces
Narrative Drifts into Forbidden Terrain
Topographies of Forbidden History in Israel/Palestine
“Until the Seventh Wave”: The Liquid Borders of Memory
Happily Ever After? Telling Endings
Unfinished Houses
The Sense of an Ending: Making Meaning through Narrative Structure
“To Make the Dream Come True”: Ending Political Violence
Ending the Research: Central Themes and Patterns Bibliography
Index
About the author
Victoria Biggs is Max Batley Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Peace Studies at the University of Sheffield. She has a PhD in Humanitarian and Conflict Response and an MA in Jewish Studies both from the University of Manchester. She has published in the Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies, the Peace Review and Holocaust Studies: A Journal of History and Culture. She received a research scholarship from the Council for British Research in the Levant to support her fieldwork in the Middle East.
Summary
How are forbidden histories told and transmitted among young people in Israel/Palestine? What can their stories teach us about their everyday experiences of segregation and political violence?
This book investigates how young people use storytelling to navigate borders, memory, and unseen spaces, and to confront questions of belonging and those they see as the ‘other’. The study is unique in its inclusion of children from a broad spectrum of communities, including Palestinian refugee camps and right-wing Israeli settlement homes. The book shows that boundary spaces are fertile ground for the transmission of forbidden stories and memories.
Young people are at the centre of the research and Victoria Biggs argues that storytelling reveals much more about their experiences and perceptions than either quantitative data or qualitative interviews. Through analysis of the language, metaphor, violence, and endings employed in the stories, storytelling is shown to be a political act that plays a vital role in shaping conflict-affected young people’s concepts of community, exclusion, and belonging.
Foreword
Investigates the attitudes and feelings of children and young people in Israel/Palestine through analysis of their storytelling
Additional text
This book focuses on young people as storytellers in the violent and politicized Israeli-Palestinian context and gives us new insights into the worries, dreams and reasoning of Palestinian and Israeli youth. By giving voice to children and youth in Palestinian cities and refugee camps, in Israeli settlements as well as in bilingual educational settings, the author manage to transmit the complexities of identity formation, place-making, political stances and processes of othering.
