Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Description

Nine days before October 7, 2023, Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia—and this book gathers that landmark address alongside a newly written afterword from the early weeks of 2024. Moving beyond the limits of conventional political commentary, she examines the war on Palestine through the lens of literature and cultural narrative, asking how stories shape what we recognize, remember, and refuse to see. With erudition and urgency, Hammad traces the ways Palestinian life and resistance are rendered visible or erased, and how “the stranger” becomes a figure through which power, empathy, and historical truth are contested. Blending literary criticism with lived immediacy, her distinctive style—sharp, humane, and deeply informed by fiction—offers a searing, illuminating account of narrative as both battleground and lifeline.

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