Esmat Elhalaby

This project is a transnational intellectual history of Gaza focusing principally on the work of Palestinian poets from the period of the British Mandate until the present. It examines the form, content, and conditions of Palestinian intellectual life in the Gaza Strip and well beyond, as Gaza’s poets confront the challenges of colonialism, exile, and expulsion. The book details the writers’ relationships with the Palestinian anti-colonial movement and with the political regimes—Arab and otherwise—which offered Palestinians refuge, patronage, and disappointment. It accounts for the centrality of Gaza in Palestinian intellectual history and narrates Gaza—which rarely has the opportunity to represent itself—through its own, largely neglected, writers.