This groundbreaking book on modern Palestinian culture goes beyond the usual focal point of the 1948 war to address the earlier, formative years. Drawing on previously unavailable biographies of Palestinians (including Palestinian Jews), Salim Tamari offers eleven vignettes of Palestine's cultural life in the momentous first half of the twentieth century. He brings to light the memoirs, diaries, letters, and other writings of six Jerusalem intellectuals whose lives spanned (and defined) the period of 1918-1948: a musician, a teacher, a former aristocrat, a doctor, a Bolshevik revolutionary, and a Jewish novelist. These essays present an integrated cultural history that illuminates a watershed in the modern social history of the Arab East, the formulation of the Arab Enlightenment.

Mountain against the Sea: Essays on Palestinian Society and Culture

History

Tamari, Salim

Africa

University of California Press

Year of the Locust: A Soldier's Diary and the Erasure of Palestine's Ottoman Past

Year of the Locust captures in page-turning detail the end of the Ottoman world and a pivotal moment in Palestinian history. In the diaries of Ihsan Hasan al-Turjman (1893–1917), the first ordinary recruit to describe World War I from the Arab side, we follow the misadventures of an Ottoman soldier stationed in Jerusalem. There he occupied himself by dreaming about his future and using family connections to avoid being sent to the Suez. His diaries draw a unique picture of daily life in the besieged city, bringing into sharp focus its communitarian alleys and obliterated neighborhoods, the ongoing political debates, and, most vividly, the voices from its streets―soldiers, peddlers, prostitutes, and vagabonds. Salim Tamari’s indispensable introduction places the diary in its local, regional, and imperial contexts while deftly revising conventional wisdom on the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.

Turjman, Ihsan Salih

Middle East

Biographies & Memoirs

Historical

The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine

This rich history of Palestine in the last decade of the Ottoman Empire reveals the nation emerging as a cultural entity engaged in a vibrant intellectual, political, and social exchange of ideas and initiatives. Employing nuanced ethnography, rare autobiographies, and unpublished maps and photos, The Great War and the Remaking of Palestine discerns a self-consciously modern and secular Palestinian public sphere. New urban sensibilities, schools, monuments, public parks, railways, and roads catalyzed by the Great War and described in detail by Salim Tamari show a world that challenges the politically driven denial of the existence of Palestine as a geographic, cultural, political, and economic space.

From the Back Cover\n"This book is a brilliant potential history of Palestine, centered on seven photographic albums collected and curated by Wasif Jawhariyyeh from the mid-1920s to the mid-1960s. With decolonial commitment and intellectual breadth, the authors turn the photographs into an inalienable entitlement (kawshun) to Palestine, and turn Palestine into an 'uninterrupted albeit traumatic' place, whose existence can neither be eradicated by Zionists actions nor erased by European narratives. This is a must-read book for scholars of Palestine and photography."—Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, author of Potential History: Unlearning Imperialism\n"Camera Palaestina offers readers both a rich visual chronicle of Palestinian social and political life in the late Ottoman and British Mandate period and a granular account of the history of photography in Palestine. The story of these archives—with their multiple genres, subjects, and standpoints—highlights the polyvalent terms of Palestinian modernity in the pivotal decades before 1948 while offering the grounds for a new theorization of Palestinian spectatorship as anticolonial practice."—Rebecca L. Stein, author of Screen Shots: State Violence on Camera in Israel and Palestine\n"Who knew that one man's photographic collection could reveal such a multifaceted picture of a society? Camera Palaestina shows how these photographs, their arrangement, and Wasif Jawhariyyeh's commentary paint an intriguing picture of Palestinian society before the Nakba, one with more ethical complexity, more religious coexistence (including with Jews), less homogeneity, and above all a society less centered on colonial powers than some may have been led to believe. The three intertwined perspectives on these albums collaborate to trouble notions of 'the' Palestinian subject. This is a profound study of the photographic practices of collecting, arranging, and annotating."—Margaret Olin, author of Touching Photographs\n"Camera Palaestina opens a new chapter in the history of photography in the Middle East. Traditionally dominated by analyses of Orientalist photography taken by Europeans and American, the focus shifts to photographers from the region. This unique book covers Palestine's political, social, and cultural history from an underrepresented perspective during times of critical transformation."—Zeynep Çelik, author of Displaying the Orient and Urban Forms of Colonial Confrontations\n"This book captures one of the most critical contributions of the growing field of the visual cultures of the Arab region and Palestine in particular: the idea that found images are in and of themselves telling of the ways in which colonial regimes of visuality, like orientalism, were unknowingly countered in everyday practices of those that lived them. Camera Palaestina demands that we look beyond the gaze and into the lived experiences of those Indigenous image makers that collected material about their political and social lives on their own terms."—Hanan Toukan, author of The Politics of Art: Dissent and Cultural Diplomacy in Palestine Lebanon and Jordan\n"Centering the Jawhariyyeh memoirs and photographic albums, this book is an impressive collaborative work of three scholars from different fields. Thoroughly contextualizing historical images and commentary through the temporalities in which they exist, the authors foreground the continuities of Palestinian life, including presences and absences, tensions and contradictions."—Annelies Moors, Professor Emerita, University of Amsterdam\nA free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. 
Camera Palaestina is a critical exploration of Jerusalemite chronicler Wasif Jawhariyyeh (1904–1972) and his seven photography albums entitled The Illustrated History of Palestine. Jawhariyyeh’s nine hundred images narrate the rich cultural and political milieu of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine. Nassar, Sheehi, and Tamari locate this

Camera Palaestina: Photography and Displaced Histories of Palestine (New Directions in Palestinian Studies) (Volume 5)

Sheehi, Stephen

Nassar, Issam

Reinterpreting the Historical Records : The Uses of Palestinian Refugee Archives for Social Science Research and Policy Analysis

Zureik, Elia

Inst for Palestine Studies

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Books by Tamari, Salim