Promotions - Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles 2023 -

Ebileeni (Univ. of Haifa) provides close readings of novels, memoirs, poetry, and films written/created in many languages by those of Palestinian descent living in many countries. Ebileeni has a thorough awareness of postcolonial theory, and he offers a complex consideration of what it has meant to be Palestinian since the Nakba--i.e., the "Palestinian catastrophe" of 1948--that displaced Palestinians from their homeland and in essence erased the Palestinian state. The works examined embody the effects of diaspora but also go beyond that term to include geographic, linguistic, political, and cultural displacement. In unpacking social/political/ideological complexities Ebileeni seeks to discover a core that transcends the multiplicity of differences among these writers and their experiences in the world. He ranges over many texts but especially lauds writers Sayed Kashua, Lina Meruane, Alaa Hlelhel, and Susan Muaddi Darraj for "break[ing] new ground in the Palestinian context" (p. xxiv). Most of the works Ebileeni explores will be unfamiliar to the majority of readers, but he makes their connections and disconnections evident in ways that speak powerfully to the global realities of all "minor literatures" and how those literatures demonstrate "a new mode of reading that illuminates receptions of the translingual and cross-cultural circuitry of texts within new contexts" (p. 17).Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.