Please join us for a talk and discussion by Professor Hana Morgenstern (University of Cambridge) on her two new books, Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/ Israel, and A People's Literature of Palestine/ Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing.

Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/ Israel follows experiments in building cultures of solidarity under conditions of extreme inequality, illustrating a theory and practice of cultural co-resistance. The book reads key periodicals such as al-Jadid and al-Ittehad as counter-institutions of cultural reconstruction and innovation, and shows how early Mizrahi Hebrew fiction is shaped by Palestinian and Arab Marxist literary aesthetics.

For the first time in English translation, A People's Literature of Palestine/ Israel: Anticolonial and Socialist Writing brings together Arabic short stories, solidarity poems and essays by Emile Habiby, Sami Michael, Tawfiq Zayyad, Shimon Ballas, Hana Ibrahim, Jabra Nicola, David Semah and Muhammad Naffa. The collection gathers personal accounts of partition, expulsion, and life in the transit camps alongside chronicles of fleeing refugees and organising that linked local struggles in occupied Palestine/ Israel to global anticolonial and socialist movements, from Egypt and Iraq to Vietnam.

The talk and discussion will be followed by a reception.

Sponsored by Penn's Department of English, Program in Comparative Literature and Literary Theory, Middle East Center, and Wolf Humanities Center.

Dr. Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Postcolonial and Middle Eastern Literature at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialisation in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures.

Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers: a transnational research collaboration exploring 20th century periodicals of anticolonial and anti-imperial production. She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary research initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, literatures and cultures that have been destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.