Samah Selim, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

Samah Selim, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

Samah Selim, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (New Texts Out Now)

By : Samah Selim

Samah Selim, Popular Fiction, Translation and the Nahda in Egypt (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Samah Selim (SS): In my first book, The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985, I had worked on the ways in which national paradigms and various iterations of realism had come to define the novel in Arabic in the twentieth century. As I conducted my research for the first book, I became really interested in the popular or genre fiction at the margins of these paradigms and modes, what critics thought of as a kind of proto-novel—firstly because these nascent genres represented an experiment that was cut short by dominant critical attitudes about the “artistic novel” (as termed by the great mid-century Egyptian critic, Abd al-Mushin Taha Badr) could and should be, and secondly because, by all accounts, they belonged to a moment when fiction in Egypt was commercially successful and widely read by literate, middle-class audiences. The fact that much of this early fiction was understood as “translated” literature, and that this translation moment was often instantiated by critics as a dubious or disreputable origin story, was also fascinating to me. So, I wanted to explore what translation meant to both readers and writers in relation to the corpus of pre-national fiction, and how this dominant critical discourse about translation was part of a set of broader social anxieties about culture, sovereignty, and radical movements.

I decided to focus on what, by all accounts, was the longest lived and most commercially successful of the fiction periodicals of the early twentieth century, The People’s Entertainments ...

JJ: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

SS: The corpus of published fiction in Arabic between roughly the last third of the nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth is huge, as scholars are increasingly discovering today. For this book, I decided to focus on what, by all accounts, was the longest lived and most commercially successful of the fiction periodicals of the early twentieth century, The People’s Entertainments (Musamarat al-sha’b 1904-1911). This was my primary focus as it offered a representative sample of the various types of genre fiction popular with early-century readers in Egypt: historical romance, crime fiction, and urban gothic (the genre known as “mysteries” or les mystères in nineteenth-century France), among others. Much of this corpus was adapted, or rather was claimed to have been adapted, from French and English. 

The central questions that the book asks are organized around the three “keywords” of the title: the question of the popular in relation to fiction, which I propose as the interlacing of a residual genre formation and an emergent market economy; the question of translation and adaptation as the motors of radical literary and cultural experiments; and the question of the Nahda as the site of often conflicting social and discursive practices and projects. 

Though ostensibly translated and adapted, many of these early novels deliberately occluded their source texts and itineraries. In the book, I explore these mystery adaptations within the context of the international market for fiction, and as a counterpoint to world literature accounts of the novel genre. My readings of individual novels published in the Entertainments explore the ways in which the fiction adaptation performs radical operations on genre systems and the institution of authorship, as well as on emergent, turn-of-the-century social and juridical discourses and practices surrounding personhood, women, liberal theories of  associationism, and finance capitalism, for example. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

SS: I think I might have partly answered this question above. I will add here that while both books are concerned with the novel as a site of social struggle, the first explored the trope of the countryside and the village, while the present one focuses on the city as the literary and social space through which colonial modernity is imagined and interrogated. Throughout my work, I have been fascinated by literary realism’s “others”—modes like romance and melodrama, for example—and how they disrupt and complicate the former’s ideological claims about representation, the real, and the ethical. I think in the Arab world, and as a result of the literary-critical history I explore in both books (more fully in the second), a wide spectrum of genre fiction has been infantilized and suppressed, relegated to the category of “youth” fiction or banished to the realm of the non- or sub-literary. (A similar—though not quite as radical—opposition is visible in the American division between the literary novel and “fiction”). Throughout my later work, I have been trying to think about realism as a historically contingent mode, as well as about the radical, political, and ethical potentialities of its others. The work of Northrop Frye and Peter Brooks has been very helpful for me in thinking through these questions. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

SS: I hope that anyone interested in the novel’s literary histories, as well as colonial and postcolonial translation histories, might find this book useful. More specifically, I also hope it might contribute to the lively and ongoing discussions in Middle Eastern Studies about the Nadha as a kind of primal instantiating moment of modernity. At the same time, it is very important to me that the book solicits a wide audience in Arabic, where debates about nationalism and hegemony have become increasingly urgent in the wake of the 2011 uprisings—so I am hoping that it will be translated sooner, rather than later.

J: What other projects are you working on now? 

SS: I am working on two projects at the moment. The first is an English translation of the late Jordanian author Ghalib Halasa’s final novel, Sultana (1987). The second is a literary biography of the Lebanese-Egyptian author Niqula Haddad (1878-1954), who also features in the present book. Haddad was a radical thinker and an extremely prolific writer; he published thirty-one novels and thirteen non-fiction books on a wide range of subjects. He is widely credited with being the progenitor of socialist thought in Egypt (he was a formative influence on the young Salama Musa who founded the Egyptian Socialist Party in 1921) and, along with his wife Rosa Antun, he advocated for a new Arab feminism. In this future book, I hope to explore Haddad’s novels through biography, which will include the narrower family triangle of his closest collaborators (Rose and Farah Antun), as well as the much broader literary and political scene in Egypt in the first half of the twentieth century.

J: What was your favorite part about writing this book? 

SS: Reading through the corpus itself was an endless delight. It is very idiosyncratic and enormously fascinating. The corpus in turn led to a fair amount of detective work on forgotten or half-remembered writers, translators, and contemporary literary and cultural debates. In the first phase of my research for the book, this feeling of discovery and constant surprise was always with me and gave me a strong dose of momentum. I imagine this is what historians regularly experience in their work. For this book, the “mysteries” of the archive and the mysteries genre that came to dominate the corpus in its later life dovetailed in ways that offered me much food for thought about the intersections between history and fiction. The comparative literary and historical aspects of the book were also enormous fun to research. I had to become something of an expert on the late-Victorian/Edwardian period in British fiction and nineteenth-century French feuilleton fiction. One of the high points of this parallel research trajectory was reading the entire 1300+ pages of Eugene Sue’s magnificent Les Mystères de Paris in French. I also had to delve into the fabulous world of nineteenth-century fictional heroes and villains, and amazing reference works like Jess Nevins’ Fantastic Victoriana were very much a part of that. Finally, I did long stints of really rewarding research on subjects I would never have attempted in the normal course of things: nineteenth-century French police regimes, and the colonial history of the British joint-stock company and the French société anonyme, for example.

 

Excerpt from the book

In the last two possibilities mentioned above, the line between adaptation and pseudotranslation can be so thin as to be meaningless. Though The Lovely Beggar-girl is saturated with the signifiers of the nineteenth century French novel, its narrative grammar belongs to another language and place: the Egypt –the Cairo- of 1909.  Rizqalla makes visible the labor of translation in the novel; in the ubiquity and precision of geographical detail (street and place names) and in the diegetic strategies he occasionally employs, when for example he pointedly describes the mystery author’s style in a particular passage or scene. At the same time, the text’s semiotic field –the social and moral conventions of the nineteenth century French novel - is strangely off-key in The Lovely Beggar-girl. The drama of class hierarchies and the minutiae of social protocols and moral codes that reflect the expectations of the Third Republic reader are stripped from the Arabic text. For example, illegitimacy –that crucial literary device and moral stigma of the French novel- is rendered in the Arabic text as a kind of casual mistake with no lasting consequences in either the social or the narrative sense. The novel opens with a most unlikely marriage between a modest provincial bourgeois and a fabulously wealthy marquis. Gilbert, the unwilling young bride, conducts an illicit affair with her original lover (a student of humble background) and secretly gives birth to his child, a daughter who eventually ends up in the hands of unscrupulous criminals. In the course of Gilbert’s discreet hunt to recover this child, her husband, the Marquis dies. Toward the end of the novel, the child is found and placed in the loving care of her natural father –now a respected scientist. Soon thereafter Gilbert (the Marquise de Samrouz) marries him, and this unorthodox little family is happily -and ‘legitimately’- reunited. The novel’s peculiar beginning and ending, and the total absence of moral judgment on, or social effects of Gilbert’s adultery forces us to question the boundary between invention and our seemingly clear-cut categories of translation.  The ‘translator’ removes (yanqul) a constantly shifting narrative assemblage (adaptations of adaptations) from one place to another, one language to another, one narrative grammar to another –The Lovely Beggar-girl replaces the French Third Republic grammar of adultery with the erotic narrative economy of medieval Arabic popular narrative. Gilbert is innocent, not because of some hidden virtue or eventual repentance, but because of ‘love’s dominion’ (sultan al-hawa); an exemplary motif that is frequently repeated in the novel. Rizqalla’s subtle challenge to an emergent bourgeois sexual morality in Egypt draws on the besieged and calumniated story heritage of the popular Arab imagination and creates a new experimental narrative grammar in the process.

We might think of The Lovely Beggar-girl as an adaptation in a deeper sense -one that is not normally included in critical definitions of the term. I would like to propose that adaptation in the nineteenth and early twentieth century Arabic context was as much an attitude towards authorship, both as an institution and as a set of discursive practices, as it was a practice of playing around with a source text. Abdelfattah Kilito identifies this attitude as a defining feature of the Arab classical tradition, and more generally of popular narrative forms where “authors are contingent and interchangeable, docile and transparent conduits for the mysterious force that animates them.” Authorship, he concludes, “is a flimsy notion, whereas genre is a highly specific and determined category, so much so that authors were perhaps nothing but products of their genres.” In “What is an Author” Michel Foucault describes the practice of naming an author as a lynchpin of “the theological affirmation of [writing’s] sacred origin or a critical belief in its creative nature.” “Author-function” is thus a kind of transcendental conceptual framework rooted in legal and institutional systems that serves a precise set of disciplinary purposes: description, classification and status-marking. “Discourse that possesses an author’s name is not to be immediately consumed and forgotten; neither is it accorded the momentary attention, given to ordinary, fleeting words. Rather, its status and its manner of reception are regulated by the culture in which it circulates.” As Foucault notes in discussing the European tradition, this “author-function” was stabilized and universalized with Romanticism and the fall from grace of the anonymous literary text, reducing this latter to a mere “puzzle to be solved.” And yet neither The Lovely Beggar-girl, nor the many other authorless adaptations of the Entertainments offer themselves as puzzles to be deciphered. On the contrary, the casual and entirely pragmatic attitude to author-function places the text front and center as a freely circulating and hence inevitably shifting discourse. Of course the adaptors of the Entertainments recognized the practical value of author-function as a generic category, where ‘the famous French author’ or a set of initials were deemed sufficient to trigger a certain set of expectations on the part of the reader. But ‘adapted from the English” was also a frank statement underlining the author’s ultimate irrelevance to narrative pleasure and purpose. K. K. Ruthven’s critique of the topos of forgery in British literary history arrives at a similar conclusion: “…agency should be ascribed to a spurious text rather than to its author.

This ‘endless disappearance’ of the postmodern writing subject was generally the norm in popular literature everywhere, from the medieval Arab epics and story-cycles to the chapbooks of early modern Europe and the detective novel adaptations of the twentieth century. Whatever the canonical literary histories might tell us, the novel in particular was especially amenable to this type of disappearing act. With the explosive commercialization of the genre in the nineteenth century and the emergence of new domestic and foreign mass markets, publishers struggled to fill a demand and writers hurried to make money. Established authors like Alexandre Dumas resorted to ghost-writing workshops, an open secret in the business. Young and struggling writers could launch their careers by writing under appropriately seductive pseudonyms. Marc Angenot relates an anecdote about a young Paul Féval and his 1844 bestseller, The Mysteries of London:

It was not Féval who chose to write The Mysteries of London, but Anténor Joly, editor-in-chief of the Courrier français, who commissioned the title from Féval, a young and impecunious writer. ‘You will call yourself Sir Francis Trolopp,’ he told the young author. ‘Success, you understand, depends entirely on the pseudonym. It’s a guarantee of local color. Come along, pen in hand, and be quick about it! We haven’t a minute to lose.’

In France, bestsellers of days gone by were adapted and reprinted for distribution to different markets well into the Third Republic, with writers and publishers “cutting [text], inverting episodes, amalgamating distinct texts and so forth.” This happy carnival of piracy seemed to have gone on without much notice of the heated debates on intellectual property of the Second Empire or the legislation that they culminated in towards the end of the century. As late as 1895, Eugène Chosson, in his detailed study of intellectual and artistic property, La Propriété littéraire, explained that “a writer only truly owns his ideas, when he does not publish them; the act of publication itself implies an inevitable passage out of the realm of ownership.” In the book Chosson established authors’ rights as a right of legal tenancy, or le droit de premier occupant. At a second remove, the text (pseudonymous, adapted) thus became, in line with this logic, “unclaimed space, ownerless property that anyone might come to occupy.” Rosemary Peters’ fascinating exploration of the precarious status of the author throughout these nineteenth century debates on literary property points to the way in which authorship functioned as a metaphor, or a set of interchangeable masks. Her metaphor of ‘the purloined text’ covers the range of practices (piracy, copying, adapting, pilfering) that together constituted a most fertile ground for the rise of the novel as a literary and commercial phenomenon in and across borders: the French ‘theft’ of the eighteenth century English gothic novel produced the mysteries, stolen in turn by the English, each strand shooting off in turn into a host of other trajectories and forms.

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New Texts Out Now: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein, guest eds. "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis." Special Issue of Conflict, Security & Development

Conflict, Security and Development, Volume 15, No. 5 (December 2015) Special issue: "Israel-Palestine after Oslo: Mapping Transformations in a Time of Deepening Crisis," Guest Editors: Mandy Turner and Cherine Hussein.

Jadaliyya (J): What made you compile this volume?

Mandy Turner (MT): Both the peace process and the two-state solution are dead. Despite more than twenty years of negotiations, Israel’s occupation, colonization and repression continue–and the political and geographical fragmentation of the Palestinian people is proceeding apace.

This is not news, nor is it surprising to any keen observer of the situation. But what is surprising–and thus requires explanation – is the resilience of the Oslo framework and paradigm: both objectively and subjectively. It operates objectively as a straitjacket by trapping Palestinians in economic and security arrangements that are designed to ensure stabilization and will not to lead to sovereignty or a just and sustainable solution. And it operates subjectively as a straitjacket by shutting out discussion of alternative ways of understanding the situation and ways out of the impasse. The persistence of this framework that is focused on conflict management and stabilization, is good for Israel but bad for Palestinians.

The Oslo peace paradigm–of a track-one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution–is therefore in crisis. And yet it is entirely possible that the current situation could continue for a while longer–particularly given the endorsement and support it enjoys from the major Western donors and the “international community,” as well as the fact that there has been no attempt to develop an alternative. The immediate short-term future is therefore bleak.

Guided by these observations, this special issue sought to undertake two tasks. The first task was to analyze the perceptions underpinning the Oslo framework and paradigm as well as some of the transformations instituted by its implementation: why is it so resilient, what has it created? The second task, which follows on from the first, was then to ask: how can we reframe our understanding of what is happening, what are some potential alternatives, and who is arguing and mobilizing for them?

These questions and themes grew out of a number of conversations with early-career scholars – some based at the Kenyon Institute in East Jerusalem, and some based in the occupied Palestinian territory and elsewhere. These conversations led to two interlinked panels at the International Studies Association annual convention in Toronto, Canada, in March 2014. To have two panels accepted on “conflict transformation and resistance in Palestine” at such a conventional international relations conference with (at the time unknown) early-career scholars is no mean feat. The large and engaged audience we received at these panels – with some very established names coming along (one of whom contributed to this special issue) – convinced us that this new stream of scholars and scholarship should have an outlet.  

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures do the articles address?

MT: The first half of the special issue analyzes how certain problematic assumptions shaped the Oslo framework, and how the Oslo framework in turn shaped the political, economic and territorial landscape.

Virginia Tilley’s article focuses on the paradigm of conflict resolution upon which the Oslo Accords were based, and calls for a re-evaluation of what she argues are the two interlinked central principles underpinning its worldview: internationally accepted notions of Israeli sovereignty; and the internationally accepted idea that the “conflict” is essentially one between two peoples–the “Palestinian people” and the “Jewish people”. Through her critical interrogation of these two “common sense” principles, Tilley proposes that the “conflict” be reinterpreted as an example of settler colonialism, and, as a result of this, recommends an alternative conflict resolution model based on a paradigm shift away from an ethno-nationalist division of the polity towards a civic model of the nation.

Tariq Dana unpacks another central plank of the Oslo paradigm–that of promoting economic relations between Israel and the OPT. He analyses this through the prism of “economic peace” (particularly the recent revival of theories of “capitalist peace”), whose underlying assumptions are predicated on the perceived superiority of economic approaches over political approaches to resolving conflict. Dana argues that there is a symbiosis between Israeli strategies of “economic peace” and recent Palestinian “statebuilding strategies” (referred to as Fayyadism), and that both operate as a form of pacification and control because economic cooperation leaves the colonial relationship unchallenged.

The political landscape in the OPT has been transformed by the Oslo paradigm, particularly by the creation of the Palestinian Authority (PA). Alaa Tartir therefore analyses the basis, agenda and trajectory of the PA, particularly its post-2007 state building strategy. By focusing on the issue of local legitimacy and accountability, and based on fieldwork in two sites in the occupied West Bank (Balata and Jenin refugee camps), Tartir concludes that the main impact of the creation of the PA on ordinary people’s lives has been the strengthening of authoritarian control and the hijacking of any meaningful visions of Palestinian liberation.

The origin of the administrative division between the West Bank and Gaza Strip is the focus of Tareq Baconi’s article. He charts how Hamas’s initial opposition to the Oslo Accords and the PA was transformed over time, leading to its participation (and success) in the 2006 legislative elections. Baconi argues that it was the perceived demise of the peace process following the collapse of the Camp David discussions that facilitated this change. But this set Hamas on a collision course with Israel and the international community, which ultimately led to the conflict between Hamas and Fateh, and the administrative division, which continues to exist.

The special issue thereafter focuses, in the second section, on alternatives and resistance to Oslo’s transformations.

Cherine Hussein’s article charts the re-emergence of the single-state idea in opposition to the processes of separation unleashed ideologically and practically that were codified in the Oslo Accords. Analysing it as both a movement of resistance and as a political alternative to Oslo, while recognizing that it is currently largely a movement of intellectuals (particularly of diaspora Palestinians and Israelis), Hussein takes seriously its claim to be a more just and liberating alternative to the two-state solution.

My article highlights the work of a small but dedicated group of anti-Zionist Jewish-Israeli activists involved in two groups: Zochrot and Boycott from Within. Both groups emerged in the post-Second Intifada period, which was marked by deep disillusionment with the Oslo paradigm. This article unpacks the alternative – albeit marginalized – analysis, solution and route to peace proposed by these groups through the application of three concepts: hegemony, counter-hegemony and praxis. The solution, argue the activists, lies in Israel-Palestine going through a process of de-Zionization and decolonization, and the process of achieving this lies in actions in solidarity with Palestinians.

This type of solidarity action is the focus of the final article by Suzanne Morrison, who analyses the “We Divest” campaign, which is the largest divestment campaign in the US and forms part of the wider Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement. Through attention to their activities and language, Morrison shows how “We Divest”, with its networked, decentralized, grassroots and horizontal structure, represents a new way of challenging Israel’s occupation and the suppression of Palestinian rights.

The two parts of the special issue are symbiotic: the critique and alternative perspectives analyzed in part two are responses to the issues and problems identified in part one.

J: How does this volume connect to and/or depart from your previous work?

MT: My work focuses on the political economy of donor intervention (which falls under the rubric of “peacebuilding”) in the OPT, particularly a critique of the Oslo peace paradigm and framework. This is a product of my broader conceptual and historical interest in the sociology of intervention as a method of capitalist expansion and imperial control (as explored in “The Politics of International Intervention: the Tyranny of Peace”, co-edited with Florian Kuhn, Routledge, 2016), and how post-conflict peacebuilding and development agendas are part of this (as explored in “Whose Peace: Critical Perspectives on the Political Economy of Peacebuilding”, co-edited with Michael Pugh and Neil Cooper (PalgraveMacmillan, 2008).  

My first book on Palestine (co-edited with Omar Shweiki), Decolonizing Palestinian Political Economy: De-development and Beyond (PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), was a collection of essays by experts in their field, of the political-economic experience of different sections of the Palestinian community. The book, however, aimed to reunite these individual experiences into one historical political-economy narrative of a people experiencing a common theme of dispossession, disenfranchisement and disarticulation. It was guided by the desire to critically assess the utility of the concept of de-development to different sectors and issues–and had a foreword by Sara Roy, the scholar who coined the term, and who was involved in the workshop from which the book emerged.

This co-edited special issue (with Cherine Hussein, who, at the time of the issue construction, was the deputy director of the Kenyon Institute) was therefore the next logical step in my research on Palestine, although my article on Jewish-Israeli anti-Zionists did constitute a slight departure from my usual focus.

J: Who do you hope will read this volume, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

MT: I would imagine the main audience will be those whose research and political interests lie in Palestine Studies. It is difficult, given the structure of academic publishing – which has become ever more corporate and money grabbing – for research outputs such as this to be accessed by the general public. Only those with access to academic libraries are sure to be able to read it – and this is a travesty, in my opinion. To counteract this commodification of knowledge, we should all provide free access to our outputs through online open source websites such as academia.edu, etc. If academic research is going to have an impact beyond merely providing more material for teaching and background reading for yet more research (which is inaccessible to the general public) then this is essential. Websites such as Jadaliyya are therefore incredibly important.

Having said all that, I am under no illusions about the potential for ANY research on Israel-Palestine to contribute to changing the dynamics of the situation. However, as a collection of excellent analyses conducted by mostly early-career scholars in the field of Palestine studies, I am hopeful that their interesting and new perspectives will be read and digested. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

MT: I am currently working on an edited volume provisionally entitled From the River to the Sea: Disintegration, Reintegration and Domination in Israel and Palestine. This book is the culmination of a two-year research project funded by the British Academy, which analyzed the impacts of the past twenty years of the Oslo peace framework and paradigm as processes of disintegration, reintegration and domination – and how they have created a new socio-economic and political landscape, which requires new agendas and frameworks. I am also working on a new research project with Tariq Dana at Birzeit University on capital and class in the occupied West Bank.

Excerpt from the Editor’s Note 

[Note: This issue was published in Dec. 2015]

Initially perceived to have inaugurated a new era of hope in the search for peace and justice in Palestine-Israel, the Oslo peace paradigm of a track one, elite-level, negotiated two-state solution is in crisis today, if not completely at an end.

While the major Western donors and the ‘international community’ continue to publicly endorse the Oslo peace paradigm, Israeli and Palestinian political elites have both stepped away from it. The Israeli government has adopted what appears to be an outright rejection of the internationally-accepted end-goal of negotiations, i.e. the emergence of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders with East Jerusalem as its capital. In March 2015, in the final days of his re-election campaign, Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited the Jewish settlement of Har Homa in Palestinian East Jerusalem, which is regarded as illegal under international law. Reminding its inhabitants that it was him and his Likud government that had established the settlement in 1997 as part of the Israeli state’s vision of a unified indivisible Jerusalem, he promised to expand the construction of settlements in East Jerusalem if re-elected. And in an interview with Israeli news site, NRG, Netanyahu vowed that the prospects of a Palestinian state were non-existent as long as he remained in office. Holding on to the occupied Palestinian territory (oPt), he argued, was necessary to ensure Israel’s security in the context of regional instability and Islamic extremism. It is widely acknowledged that Netanyahu’s emphasis on Israel’s security—against both external and internal enemies—gave him a surprise win in an election he was widely expected to lose.

Despite attempts to backtrack under recognition that the US and European states are critical of this turn in official Israeli state policy, Netanyahu’s promise to bury the two-state solution in favour of a policy of further annexation has become the Israeli government’s official intent, and has been enthusiastically endorsed by leading ministers and key advisers.

[…]

The Palestinian Authority (PA) based in the West Bank also appears to have rejected a key principle of the Oslo peace paradigm—that of bilateral negotiations under the supervision of the US. Despite a herculean effort by US Secretary of State, John Kerry, to bring the two parties to the negotiating table, in response to the lack of movement towards final status issues and continued settlement expansion (amongst other issues), the Palestinian political elite have withdrawn from negotiations and resumed attempts to ‘internationalise the struggle’ by seeking membership of international organisations such as the United Nations (UN), and signing international treaties such as the Rome Statute, the founding treaty of the International Criminal Court. This change of direction is part of a rethink in the PA and PLO’s strategy rooted in wider discussions and debates. The publication of a document by the Palestine Strategy Study Group (PSSG) in August 2008, the production of which involved many members of the Palestinian political elite (and whose recommendations were studiously discussed at the highest levels of the PA and PLO), showed widespread discontent with the bilateral negotiations framework and suggested ways in which Palestinians could ‘regain the initiative’.

[…]

And yet despite these changes in official Palestinian and Israeli political strategies that signal a deepening of the crisis, donors and the ‘international community’ are reluctant to accept the failure of the Oslo peace paradigm. This political myopia has meant the persistence of a framework that is increasingly divorced from the possibility of a just and sustainable peace. It is also acting as an ideological straitjacket by shutting out alternative interpretations. This special issue seeks a way out of this political and intellectual dead end. In pursuit of this, our various contributions undertake what we regard to be two key tasks: first, to critically analyse the perceptions underpinning the Oslo paradigm and the transformations instituted by its implementation; and second, to assess some alternative ways of understanding the situation rooted in new strategies of resistance that have emerged in the context of these transformations in the post-Oslo landscape.

[…]

Taken as a whole, the articles in this special issue aim to ignite conversations on the conflict that are not based within abstracted debates that centre upon the peace process itself—but that begin from within the realities and geographies of both the continually transforming land of Palestine-Israel and the voices, struggles, worldviews and imaginings of the future of the people who presently inhabit it. For it is by highlighting these transformations, and from within these points of beginning, that we believe more hopeful pathways for alternative ways forward can be collectively imagined, articulated, debated and built.