Palestine through its literature

Lydia Wright, Bodleian Librarian for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and Mohamed-Salah Omri, Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of St John’s College have teamed up to highlight the diversity of Palestinian literature in a dedicated display at the Bodleian Nizami Ganjavi Library, from 4/12/2023 date. The display is an invitation to read Palestinian poetry, short stories, memoirs and novels in Arabic, English, Hebrew and in translation. The call to read follows a series of seminars lead by Professor Mohamed-Salah Omri in collaboration with Ziad Kiblawi, an Oxford DPhil student focusing on Arabic intellectual history. These seminars were designed to read and discuss Palestine through her literature. The series aims to participate in an inclusive and democratic decolonial education, which does not exclude forms of coloniality and anti-colonial struggles based on considerations of racial, ethnic or religious backgrounds. They took place in hybrid mode and attracted hundreds of participants from a wide audience, which included university students and staff, the general public- from around the world.  Video recordings of the three seminars (Poetic Palestine; Gaza Writes; Expressions of Exile) can be found here https://mohamedsalahomri.com/literary-palestine. Together with the books proposed for reading by the library, they aim to provide a window on how Palestinians represented their personal and collective history, expressed their hopes and reflected on their society in a diversity of styles, modes and languages.