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This event will take place at Al-Hambra Palace, 1240 West Randolph Street.

The event is free, but we ask that you reserve a place here.

We are delighted to welcome Rashid Khalidi to Chicago for a conversation with Eman Abdelhadi and Nadine Naber, to launch the first english translation of Ghassan Kanafani's Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation 1948-68.

Ghassan Kanafani’s remarkable extended essay Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968 is an unyielding act of cultural and political endurance. Writing in the wake of Israel’s devastating territorial expansion in 1967, Kanafani elaborates his theory of resistance literature and offers a visceral account of life under occupation. Translated for the first time into English by one of the greatest living translators from Arabic to English, Tarif Khalidi, Kanafani’s essay offers one of the sharpest social and political analyses of life in Palestine in this early period of occupation. In the two decades following the Nakba, Palestinian writers undertook the gruelling task of advancing a cultural struggle to protect their language, culture, and heritage. Join us for a conversation about this newly translated text and its relevance to the continued struggle for Palestinian liberation.

This event is co-hosted by Pilsen Community Books, Al-Hambra Palace and the Palestinian Youth Movement.

Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a B.A. from Yale University and a D. Phil. from Oxford University, and taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He was editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, and served as President of the Middle East Studies Association. He has authored ten books, most recently The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017; Palestine: A Primer; and, with Tariq Ali, The Neck and the Sword: Palestine’s Unfinished Struggle. He is completing a book on how British counter-insurgency practices employed in interwar Ireland and Palestine shaped Israeli military doctrine.

Eman Abdelhadi is a Chicago-based scholar, organizer, and writer. She is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming Impossible Futures: Why Women Leave Muslim Communities (University of Chicago Press). With M.E. O'Brien, she co-edited the forthcoming science fiction anthology When We Win: Dispatches from Revolutionary Futures (Haymarket Press, June 2027) and co-authored the novel Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052–2072 (Common Notions, 2022). Together they also co-edit the revolutionary fiction website Project 2052. Her scholarship, poetry, short stories, and essays have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies. A long-time organizer, she is currently active in Scholars for Justice, Faculty & Staff for Justice in Palestine, and the AAUP at the University of Chicago.

Nadine Naber is a Professor and Director of Gender and Women’s Studies at UIC. She is co-founder and co-director of Mamas Activating Movements for Abolition and Solidarity (MAMAS) and Board member of the Arab American Action Network and the Journal of Palestine Studies. She is the author/editor of six books such as Arab America: Gender, Activism, and Belonging (NYU, 2012); Radical Mothering (Haymarket 2026); Arab and Arab American Feminisms (Syracuse 2011); and the Color of Violence (South End Press 2006).