In the Battlefield

Ruba Salameh, B.L Pal3 (2025) 135.5 x 198 cm.

Hanna Mikhail was born in British Palestine in 1935. Walter Rodney in British Guiana in 1942. Both were extraordinary scholars. Once anti-imperialist students at the great imperial schools of Harvard and SOAS, they were destined to take their talents far beyond the campus and the page. If Mikhail and Rodney entered the library to understand origins (of Islamic political theory and the Atlantic slave trade, respectively), their subsequent political activity was motivated by endings: ending colonial rule, political domination, and capitalist exploitation. Capacious and erudite in their scholarship and humane and committed in their sensibility, they eventually arrived upon the battlefield, and not the metaphorical one we delimit for ideas. Their deaths, untimely in the extreme, great tragedies for their kin and their movements, precipitated profound reflections from their comrades distant from the battlefield. C.L.R. James and Edward Said below. 

****

That is why Walter found himself in a car with a member of Burnham’s army making some arrangement about some gadget that turned out to be an explosive. He should never have been there. No political leader had any right to be there. Not only should he have never been there, the people around him should have seen to it that he was not in any such position. That was a fundamental mistake, and it was a political mistake. IT was not a mistake in personal judgment. It was because he was doing all sorts of things to show them that a revolutionary is prepared to do anything. And that was not the way. In the middle of the Russian Revolution, they were locking up leaders and their followers to tell them, “Go to Finland, get out of here, or you will be arrested. They will have a trial and the judge will condemn you to death. Or even before you are brought out, they will shoot you in the jail.” They had to chase Lenin out. Walter should never have been in that situation. Never, I hope you agree with me, and I hope you realize that that was a fundamental mistake, a political mistake. It is the business of a political organization to protect its leaders and its important people. So the whole tendency was as if he was already ready for a civil war. And even if he was ready for civil war, no leader should have been in that situation at all.

— C.L.R. James, “Walter Rodney and the Question of Power” (1981) 

In the months before his death, I was impressed with how his dissenting ideas had spread within Fateh in Beirut. He told me of a trip he took to North Vietnam and how that had strengthened his conviction on selfless dedication and careful organization and discipline. I had also begun to surmise-I have no hard information on which to rely, except that somewhat precarious evidence I deduced from friends of his –that he had begun to trouble the leadership with his earnest dissent and the growing influence that he exerted on those who worked with him. I must say in all honesty and sadness that his untoward disappearance and subsequence death in 1976 seemed to me not to have been so inconvenient for those in Fateh who found his opposition to political maneuvering, cronyism and the bending of principles so irritatingly well-represented by Hanna’s practice and theory. His disappearance while on what appeared to be a foolishly contrived mission to go by a small and unprotected boat from Beirut to Tripoli in waters that were constantly patrolled by Israeli and Phalanges forces seemed like the result of incredibly poor planning and a great deal of unacceptable carelessness. For year after this tragic cadence to his life, I often thought that that ill-fated voyage had robbed the Palestinian movement of one of its most principled and humanely inspired cadres. No wonder then that so many of his friends and especially his brave widow Jehan refused to accept that fact of his capture as final, and no wonder that so many of us had a strong stake in keeping hope alive for his release and return.

— Edward Said, “Preface,” in Hanna Mikhail, Politics and Revelation: Mawardi and After (1995) 

Call For Papers: On Palestinians' Terms

Kamal Boulatta, Thawra/Tharwa, 1978, 73.5 × 56.2 cm.

CFP: On Palestinians’ Terms  

 

Special issue of TOPIA: Canadian Journal of Cultural Studies, Spring 2027

 

Edited by Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (Concordia University) and Esmat Elhalaby (University of Toronto)

 

We aim to account for Palestine beyond the genocidal frame within which it has been condemned. Recently, genocide in Gaza has stimulated efforts to rectify a long-standing hostility to Palestine in North American culture. The “Palestine Special Issue” has decisively entered the scene. The content and form of such a genre—of which this issue of TOPIA will be a part—should be a potent site of contestation. Demanding how and why Palestine should be articulated remains necessary now, after the recalcitrant desire of Palestine’s enemies to censor such work no matter its method or tenor. “Palestine” as a scholarly keyword can not be made to offer disciplinary salvation or mere conceptual remedies. Our responsibility to the living and the dead in Gaza is significantly greater.

 

We seek to publish accounts of and from Palestine and its significant international connections. The terms of Palestinian life and liberation have been widely and deeply shared. And the legacy of the Palestinian Revolution in the Third and Fourth Worlds still demands a thorough accounting, beyond the mere circulation of artifacts or slogans. Submissions attuned to the travel of Palestinians, Palestinian images, and Palestinian theory in Indigenous, Black, Afro-Asian movements and struggles are especially welcome. We consider necessary: thorough engagements with texts, close attention to images, and honest confrontations with historical challenges, silences, and elisions.

 

In the century of their colonization, Palestinians have repeatedly sought to narrate Palestine on their own terms. These have not been monolithic representations, nor mere efforts to contest the colonial Palestine imagined and planned in nineteenth century Europe. Rather, Palestinians produced a corpus of work attesting both to the exceptional and ordinary in their collective life and worldly history. We may turn to the Spanish of Mahfud Masis, the French of Elias Sanbar, and the English of Soraya Antonius for substantial testament to these facts. But a considerable proportion Palestine’s own terms of art and wells of tradition—including those of exile and displaceament—are to be found only in the Arabic of Khalil al-Sakakini, Rashid Hussien, Fadwa Tawqan, Muin Bsieso, Hanna Abu Hanna, Samira Azzam, Ghassan Kanafani, Walid Daqqa—in short—only in Arabic.

 

Contemporary narrations and representations of Palestine and Palestinians, including those made in the spirit of solidarity or animated by a humanitarian impulse, have either overlooked or caricatured this substantial tradition of Arabic poetry, film, folklore, history, philosophy, theology, geography, or philology, as the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah has often reminded us. Attention to its Arabic idioms links Palestine inexorably to its region and beyond, to the world of Syria, Sudan, or Iraq it has long inhabited. Zionism first and the “peace process” after have sought to sever Palestine from this Arab, Mediterranean, and Afro-Asian space. Narrow scholarly structures and expedient political arrangements have calcified this colonial situation in our thought, even in purportedly anti-colonial or decolonial modes.

 

Opportunism and parochialism have produced shelves of recent books on Palestine’s contemporary condition, exemplified, of course, by genocide in the Gaza Strip, that turn inevitably on tired analogies and cliches and rarely if ever to the work of Palestinians themselves. The present conditions of Palestine, however, demand we revise our frames of reference. “First,” the Palestinian historian Tarif Khalidi has recently written,

 

the matter of names: it is no longer acceptable for our generation to use terms such as “the West Bank” “the Gaza Strip” (what a hideous word, qita’!), “the lands of ‘48” and even trivial descriptions like “the northern and southern parts of the West Bank” and the alphabet of classifications imposed on Palestinian regions. “Al-Aqsa Flood” shattered all these terms and brought us back to one unified Palestine. Let us speak from now on of northern Palestine, central Palestine, and southern Palestine, mentioning the names of their cities when necessary. Those other terms are the remnants of the Nakba and imposed upon us by tyranny and colonialism. We accepted them into our geographical lexicon without recalling that even the generation that directly preceded ours (say the generation of 1919 to 1948) would have been extremely surprised by these names.

 

This special issue of TOPIA invites essays, reflections, poetry, visual art, and translations that examine Palestinian frames of reference and forms of knowledge. From the continuous Nakba to the embodied resistance of Intifadas, knowledge made in Palestine and alongside it can offer insights into the relationship between destruction, survival, and liberation. 

 

We seek contributions to this special issue on the following, and related, topics:

 

●  Palestinian connections with the Arab world, the Third World, and the Fourth World

●  Palestinian art and media in context, including photography, film, painting, graphic design, and digital art

●  Translations from Arabic or other languages, especially less commonly known languages and authors

●  Studies of Palestinian thought in exile and diaspora

●  Interviews with Palestinian intellectuals and artists

●  Accounts of Palestinian institutions, past and present, including schools, libraries, archives, art groups, theatre troupes, literary circles, unions, and parties

 

Abstracts of 300-500 words should be submitted by March 1, 2026 on this form. By mid-March, authors will be informed whether to submit their work for further consideration. Complete contributions should be submitted for review by June 2026. Publication of the special issue is scheduled for Spring 2027.

 

Please direct any questions to the co-editors of this special issue: Nayrouz Abu Hatoum (nayrouz.abuhatoum@concordia.ca) or Esmat Elhalaby (esmat.elhalaby@utoronto.ca)