Barbara Harlow

After lives : legacies of revolutionary writing

In recent years, three of the main sites of liberation struggle in the world - Palestines, El Salvador, and South Africa - appear to have been transformed into arenas of negotiation and peace processes. Talk of revolution, violence, and state repression has been replaced by the promise - or its lack - of truth commissions, reconciliation, amnesties. Barbara Harlow, in this powerful and passionate study, examines this change through the prism of political assassination. Ghassan Kanafani, Roque Dalton and Ruth First all of whom laboured on behalf of social revolutions they did not see, are case studies in her exploration of the intricate relations between politically engaged imaginative writing and participation in revolutionary struggle. The stories of their lives and deaths illustrate the causes and circumstances of political assassination and provoke reflection on the wave of self-questioning currently engaging the PLO, the FMLN, and the ANC. In a moving consideration of the complex tensions that motivate and condition political writing, After Lives explores the costs and gains that accrue to writers who put their works and their lives on the line.

Palestine's children : Returning to Haifa and other stories

Introduction, B. Harlow and K.E. Riley Ghassan Kanafani - A Biographical Essay, K.E. Riley The Slope A Present from Ramleh The Child Borrows his Uncles Gun and Goes East to Safad Doctor Qassim Talks to Eva About Mansur who has Arrived in Safad Abu al-Hassan Ambushes an English Car The Child, His Father and the Gun Go to the Citadel al Jaddin The Child Goes to the Camp The Child Discovers that the Key Looks Like an Axe Sulimans Friend Learns Many Things in One Night Hamid Stops Listening to the Uncles stories Guns in the Camp He Was a Child that Day Six Eagles and a Child Returning to Haifa.

'Extraordinary renditions': tales of Guantánamo, a review article

The opening of Guantánamo as a US detention centre in the initial phase of the ‘war on terror’ in January 2002 and its continuing existence almost a decade later have spawned a vast body of literature and cultural production: political commentary, personal accounts of detainees, memoirs, fiction, legal analysis, film, documentary, reconstruction, and so on. In this major review of Guantánamo literature, which foregrounds work by Moazzam Begg, Victoria Brittain and Gillian Slovo, Mahvish Rukhsana Khan, Anna Perera and Clive Stafford Smith, the author analyses the whole field to shed light not simply on the interconnections and disjunctions between the various modes of representation, but also on how the works serve, in different ways, the aim of closing Guantánamo for good, and what they reveal about the nature, imperatives and relationship to international law of the US state.

Archives of Empire: Volume I. From The East India Company to the Suez Canal

Company to Canal 17557-1869 Oriental despotism The impeachment of Warren Hastings The case of Tipu Sultan Orientalism Laws and orders Thugee/Thagi Suttee/Sati The Indian Uprising / Sepoy Mutiny 1857-58 The Suez Canal: The gala opening The Suez Canal: The Builder: Ferdinand de Lesseps The Suez Canal: The Canal and its consequences The Arabi Uprising Pilgrims, Travelers and Tourists

Archives of Empire

A rich collection of primary materials, the multivolume Archives of Empire provides a documentary history of nineteenth-century British imperialism from the Indian subcontinent to the Suez Canal to southernmost Africa. Barbara Harlow and Mia Carter have carefully selected a diverse range of texts that track the debates over imperialism in the ranks of the military, the corridors of political power, the lobbies of missionary organizations, the halls of royal geographic and ethnographic societies, the boardrooms of trading companies, the editorial offices of major newspapers, and far-flung parts of the empire itself. Focusing on a particular region and historical period, each volume in Archives of Empire is organized into sections preceded by brief introductions. Documents including mercantile company charters, parliamentary records, explorers’ accounts, and political cartoons are complemented by timelines, maps, and bibligraphies. Unique resources for teachers and students, these volumes reveal the complexities of nineteenth-century colonialism and emphasize its enduring relevance to the “global markets” of the twenty-first century. While focusing on the expansion of the British Empire, The Scramble for Africa illuminates the intense nineteenth-century contest among European nations over Africa’s land, people, and resources. Highlighting the 1885 Berlin Conference in which Britain, France, Germany, Portugal, and Italy partitioned Africa among themselves, this collection follows British conflicts with other nations over different regions as well as its eventual challenge to Leopold of Belgium’s rule of the Congo. The reports, speeches, treatises, proclamations, letters, and cartoons assembled here include works by Henry M. Stanley, David Livingstone, Joseph Conrad, G. W. F. Hegel, Winston Churchill, Charles Darwin, and Arthur Conan Doyle. A number of pieces highlight the proliferation of companies chartered to pursue Africa’s gold, diamonds, and oil—particularly Cecil J. Rhodes’s British South Africa Company and Frederick Lugard’s Royal Niger Company. Other documents describe debacles on the continent—such as the defeat of General Gordon in Khartoum and the Anglo-Boer War—and the criticism of imperial maneuvers by proto-human rights activists including George Washington Williams, Mark Twain, Olive Schreiner, and E.D. Morel.

Narrative in Prison: Stories from the Palestinian Intifada

The stranger-than-fiction story of Um Khadr tells the life of a Palestinian woman living under Israeli occupation. When she had been married for ten years, Um Khadrs husband, Abd al-Rahman, traveled to Brazil where he hoped to earn enough money to support his wife and their two sons and two daughters at home. Um Khadr did not hear from the man she married for another thirty years. Her youngest daughter is a deaf mute. Her first daughter was abandoned by her own husband who left her behind with five children when he married a Syrian woman. Khadr, the Palestinian mothers eldest son, is in an Israeli prison, sentenced to ninety-six years behind bars. His younger brother Ghazi spent ten years

THE GEOGRAPHY AND THE EVENT

‘The Geography and the Event’ seeks to ‘misread’ (along the lines suggested by the volumes English translator) Mahmoud Darwishs Memory for Forgetfulness, the poets memoir of the Israeli siege of Beirut in the summer of 1982, by way of comparison/contrast with the 2009 Goldstone Report (‘Human Rights in Palestine and Other Occupied Arab Territories’) on the Israeli three-week siege of Gaza (Operation Cast Lead) in late 2008–2009.

Sappers in the Stacks: Colonial Archives, Land Mines, and Truth Commissions

[Kip] had approached the villa on that night of the storm not out of curiosity about the music but because of a danger to the piano player. The retreating army often left pencil mines within musical instruments. Returning owners opened up pianos and lost their hands. People would revive the swing on a grandfather clock, and a glass bomb would blow out half a wall and whoever was nearby. He followed the noise of the piano, rushing up the hill with Hardy, climbed over the stone wall and entered the villa. As long as there was no pause it meant the player would not lean forward and pull out the thin metal band to set the metronome going. Most pencil bombs were hidden in these-the easiest place to solder the thin layer of wire upright. Bombs were attached to the spines of books, they were drilled into fruit trees so an apple falling onto a lower branch would

SPEAKING FROM THE DOCK

Britain can be rather awkward about the sounds and voices it wants people to hear and when it wants them to be heard. Not everyone can appear on television and radio and those who can, are subject to fussy rules about what they can say, and, in what language. There are different rules when confronted with the British or RUC on the streets-though you still must be careful what language you speak. In Gough or Castlereagh Barracks they will try very hard indeed to hear your voice. It is different again in Crumlin Road Courthouse where, instead of being forced into silence or tortured into talking, the judge can infer guilt if you refuse to speak. After all that, if you have used the only language they really understand or spoken when you should have been quiet, you could end up spending a long time in a prison cell where the British would very much like to hear

Egyptian Intellectuals and the Debate on the "Normalization of Cultural Relations"

However dominant a social system may be, the very meaning of its domination involves a limitation or selection of the activities it covers, so that by definition it cannot exhaust all social experience, which therefore always potentially contains space for alternative acts and alternative intentions which are not yet articulated as a social institution or even project. Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters