About the Book
Open-air prison, Terror, Resistance, Occupation, Siege, Trauma, Bare humanity: irrespective of when, where, and to whom the word is uttered, Gaza immediately evokes an abundance of metaphors. Similarly, a plethora of metaphors also invoke Gaza: Crisis, Exception, Refugees, Destitution, Tunnels, Persistence. With essays written by journalists, writers, doctors, academics and others, this volume uses metaphor to record and historicize Gaza, to contextualize its everyday realities, interrogate its representations and provide an understanding on Gaza's real and symbolic significance. The essays within, written both from within Gaza and outside, touch on life and survival, the making of the Gaza Strip and its increasing isolation, the discursive and visual tools that have often shackled Gaza behind misunderstandings, and what Gaza contributes to our understanding of exception; inequality; dispossession; bio-politics; necro-power and other terms which we rely on to make sense of our world. The volume reveals how Gaza is an outcome of specific historical and spatial practices, and not simply a metaphor of a far-away humanitarian disaster or place of incomprehensible violence.Gaza As Metaphor demonstrates that Gaza is a real place, an inseparable part of the past, present, and future condition of Palestinians, in particular, and of dispossession, more generally.
Table of Contents:
* Cover art by Raed Issa * Introduction by Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar * Photo by Tanya Habjouqa (from Women of Gaza series) * Section 1: Living Gaza 1. Helga Tawil-Souri, Gaza as Larger Than Life 2. Haidar Eid, Diary July 20, 2014 / Signposts on the Road to Liberation 3. Said Shehadeh, Ghazeh el Sumud: Confronting Israeli Mass Torture 4. Pierre Krahenbuhl, Gaza as a Metaphor for Unsustainability 5. Mouin Rabbani, Israel Mows the Lawn6. Naim Al Khatib, On War and Shit* Photo by Jim McFarlane (from Gaza Anti-Portraits series) [* needs to be confirmed]* Section 2: Placing Gaza 1. Khaled Hroub, Tunnels: Love, Lions and ... Absurdities 2. Jehad Abusalim, From Fence to Fence: Retelling Gaza's Story 3. Ilana Feldman, Gaza: Isolation 4. Salman Abu Sitta, Gaza Strip: The Lessons of History 5. Glenn Bowman, Gaza: Encystation * Photo by Omar Al Qattaa (children in Gaza) * Section 3: Narrating Gaza 1. Selma Dabbagh, Inventing Gaza2. Ramzy Baroud, Fighting Another Day: Gaza's Unrelenting Resistance3. Atef Alshaer, In the company of Frantz Fanon: The Israeli Wars and the National Culture of Gaza4. Ilan Pappe, Can the Pen be Mightier than the Sword? Permission to Narrate Gaza5. Dina Matar, Gaza: Image Normalization * Photo by Omar Al Qattaa (Parkour photo) * Section 4: Thinking Gaza1. Darryl Li, Gaza at the Frontiers of Zionism 2. Ariella Azoulay, Concentration-Place 3. Nimer Sultany, Repetition 4. Sara Roy, Gaza: No Se Puede Mirar - One Cannot Look, A Brief Reflection 5. Sherene Seikaly, Gaza as Archive * Biographies* Index
About the Author :
Helga Tawil-Souri is Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University. Dina Matar is the Director of the Centre for Media and Film Studies at SOAS, University of London and the co-editor of The Hizbullah Phenomenon: Politics and Communication (Oxford University Press, 2014).
Review :
'Perhaps more than any place on earth, Gaza is a microcosm of our world of cruelty and barbarism, but, no less, of courage, creativity and resilience. With sympathy and deep understanding, these essays reveal the terror and sheer savagery to which the people of Gaza are subjected daily and their brave refusal to succumb to despair and hopelessness. A searing rendition of grim tragedy, and a powerful call to action.'
'Gaza is a truth, to paraphrase Nietzsche, demanding its metaphors. In Gaza as Metaphor, Helga Tawil-Souri and Dina Matar have gathered the whirlwind momentum of a critical mass of caring intellects to dwell on the hermeneutic precipice when a piece of land in Palestine has become the fragmented site of a truth so bold and demanding that forces all our languages to defy the tyranny of their compromised grammar. You have not read a book on Palestine as an enduring testimony to defiant dignity as Gaza as Metaphor. It captures with uncanny precision a traumatic moment in a colossal catastrophe the Palestinians call Nakba and the rest of the world can now see as the mirror metaphor of their own innermost struggles for truth and justice.'
'Gaza is a microcosm of global realities, "surplus humanity" fighting oppression and induced impoverishment against powerful militaries of the Global North. Through the fluid medium of metaphor, Tawil-Souri and Matar provide their contributors with a means of exploring the range of ways Gazans cope with imposed conditions of dispossession and "bare life." Ultimately, they collectively rescue Gaza from metaphor as an actual location of humanity and resistance.'
'This pathbreaking book takes the reader beyond the spectacle of ferocious warfare on Gaza to open up an expansive gaze onto a hermetically-sealed strip that has become both metaphor and metonymy for the Palestinian condition. The volume lucidly unpacks the metaphors by which Gazans live and die, shedding empathetic light on their creative quotidian struggles to exist. Written within diverse genres, the essays offer the reader vital conceptual tools for engaging the ongoing nakba of Palestinian history.'
'Gaza as Metaphor offers an impressive selection of the most recent work of some of the best specialists, Palestinian and non-Palestinian. It is a very welcome reminder, as one of the contributors puts it, that "Gaza is Palestine." Stimulating and dense, this edited volume is also fluid and absorbing.'
'This carefully edited collection of essays and stories, mainly by Palestinian academics, is a rich insight into Gaza's reality of human life versus inhuman violence -- a challenge to false constructed image and narrative. These "unwanted Palestinians" come to life in vivid evocations of day-to-day struggle under Israeli military onslaught, and the tunnels' business of lions and radiant brides coming through to life in Gaza.'
'Gaza as Metaphor is an exemplary collection: comprehensive despite its relatively small size, greatly readable, very stimulating, and most satisfying intellectually and aesthetically: a landmark in Gaza studies and an important addition to Palestine studies.'
'All [the contributors] have something unique and important to impart in this compilation of consistently excellent essays ... If widely read, Gaza as Metaphor has the potential to raise the volume and increase the resonance of Gazans' stories.'
