In the Afterword to the published version of her Edward W Said Lecture at Columbia University given in late September 2023, Isabella Hammad asks what would Said say about the current crisis in Gaza. Although her lecture was given just before the October events, the Afterword — specifically penned to address the ensuing Israeli genocide — reads like an extended footnote to her lecture, exploring the gravity of Said’s work for an understanding of Israel’s decades-long occupation, ethnic cleansing, and colonisation of Palestine.

Yahia Lababidi and Norman Saadi Nikro review thew new book by Omar El Akkad and collection edited by Mahmoud Muna and Matthew Teller.

Palestinians are quite capable of photographing themselves, employing resources to represent and narrate not only their circumstances, but how they creatively engage their relationships to their circumstances. Neither numbers nor abject subjects of violence, they continue to disturb and challenge the Israeli onslaught by resisting their reduction to bare life.

The after of El Hassan’s afterlife is never merely an after, but rather is always becoming after. In her hands, the remains of plunder assert themselves as mobile “sites of memory” — to borrow a compelling term from the late Toni Morrison — activated  by a people, Palestinians, striving not to be erased from history.

Currently, in Gaza, Israel is destroying the institutional basis for the reproduction and maintenance of social and cultural life, as well as administrative capacities to maintain records and documentation by which social and cultural life is organised. But in demolishing Palestinian homes, it is also destroying family artefacts, heirlooms, personal records, books, photographs and photographic collections that constitute a family’s capacity to reproduce its memories.