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PALESTINIAN VILLAGE HISTORIES: GEOGRAPHIES OF THE DISPLACED Rochelle Davis Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011 (xxiii + 328 pages, illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index) $70.00 (cloth), $24.95 (paper)
Rochelle Davis's careful reflection on over a hundred village memorial books enriches our understanding of erased Palestinian histories and is an invaluable contribution to studies that seek to shed light on the Palestinian present though an analysis of representations of the past. In scholarly yet readable prose, she examines not only the content of what people remember, but also the ways in which this content is recalled and commemorated in memorial books written and collected across the lands of Palestine and the diaspora.
Official histories are produced and circulated by those in positions of power. Being neither Israeli victor nor part of a small, struggling Palestinian elite with limited access to centers of knowledge production, refugees have seen their narratives and experiences doubly marginalized in academic and historical analysis. The majority came from a rural peasant class (fellahin) with little or no connection to political and educational institutions of the cities. Whether they were living in camps outside Damascus or in makeshifthomes in the Galilee, for the Palestinian dispossessed, recording history was beyond the scope of immediate capacity or urgent need.
After 1948, scholars such as Walid Khalidi and Constantine Zurayk examined the causes of the loss of Palestine and possible solutions within a nationalist metanarrative. However, it was not until thirty years after the destruction of hundreds of Palestinian villages, with the publication of oral histories recorded by Nafez Nazzal and Rosemary Sayigh in the camps of Lebanon, that accounts of those from ordinary walks of life who actually experienced the nakba began to be discussed in a wider arena. In 1992, Khalidi's All That Remains presented detailed evidence of the existence and destruction of 418 individual villages and some indication of where villagers found exile; two decades on, this book continues to be a key text for scholars and activists. Following the 1980s opening of Israeli archives, Nur Masalha, Ilan Pappé, and others brought more localized Palestinian histories and experiences further into view.
Meanwhile, as Davis's work shows, in the early 1980s Palestinians began to record their own localized village histories in the form of...