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During the 1948 war more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs fled or were violently expelled from their homes by Zionist militias. The legacy of the Nakba - which translates to disaster or catastrophe - lays bare the violence of the ongoing Palestinian plight.Voices of the Nakba collects the stories of first-generation Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, documenting a watershed moment in the history of the modern Middle East through the voices of the people who lived through it.The interviews, with commentary from leading scholars of Palestine and the Middle East, offer a vivid journey into the history, politics and culture of Palestine, defining Palestinian popular memory on its own terms in all its plurality and complexity.
List of contents
Preface - Mahmoud Zeidan (Co-founder of the Nakba Archive)Introduction - Diana Allan (Co-founder of the Nakba Archive; McGill University)Part 1 Life in pre-1948 Palestine 1. Village Life in Palestine by Rochelle Davis (Georgetown University)2. Of Forests and Trees: City Life in 1930s Palestine by Sherene Seikaly (UC Santa Barbara)3. The Margin and the Centre in Narrating pre-1948 Palestine by Amirah Silmi (Birzeit University)4. Mandated Memory: The Schooling of Palestine in Anis Sayighs and Nicola Ziadehs pre-1948 Recollections by Dyala Hamzah (Université de Montréal)Part 2 The British Mandate and the Palestine Resistance5. Motivations and Tensions of Palestinian Police Service under British Rule by Alex Winder (Brown University)6. Storying the Great Arab Revolt: Narratives of Resistance During 1936-39 by Jacob Norris (University of Sussex)7. Songs of Resistance by Ted Swedenburg (University of Arkansas)Part 3. War and Ethnic Cleansing8. The Roots of the Nakba by Salman Abu Sitta (Independent Researcher)9. The Massacres of Salha, Husayniyya, Safsaf and Ilut by Saleh Abd al-Jawad (Birzeit University)10. Remembering the Fight by Laila Parsons (McGill University)Part 4 Flight and Exile11. The Dispossession of Lydd by Lena Jayussi (Zayed University)12. When Women Remember: Gender, Trauma and Counter-memories by Ruba Salih (SOAS)13. The Politics of Listening by Cynthia Kreichati (McGill University)Afterword - Oral History in Palestinian Studies by Rosemary SayighGlossaryContributorsBibliographyIndex
About the author
Diana Allan is Associate Professor of Anthropology at McGill University. She is a filmmaker and the co-founder of the Nakba Archive. Her ethnography, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile, (Stanford University Press, 2013) won the MEMO Palestine academic book award and the American Anthropological Association, Middle East Section Award.
