Overland 254 is the first in a set of four special editions dedicated to commemorating 70 years of Overland. This issue also launches a new design and format by Common Room Editions, inspired by Overland’s trove of radical literature spanning from 1954 to today. Andrew Brooks and Astrid Lorange consider the asymmetrical responses to two events: the wearing of keffiyehs by three cast members during the Sydney Theatre Company’s production of Anton Chekov’s The Seagull, and, on the same day in the US, the shooting of three Palestinian men wearing keffiyehs. Jeff Sparrow uncovers the Sydney Herald’s legacy of Terra Nullius, and Daniel Lopez writes on Marx, Meredith and the festival as an inversion of modern life.
Tasnim Mahmoud Sammak is a PhD candidate at Monash University, faculty of Education and Palestinian organiser. Her research project explores the emergence of radical political subjectivities and imaginaries. Tasnim’s grandparents were exiled from Yaffa during the Nakba in 1948 to a refugee camp in Gaza, where they, including her father, were again displaced to Al-Hussein refugee camp in Amman after the annexations of 1967, when her mother and her family were also exiled from Ya’bad, Jenin in the West Bank.
