Resistance Literature Barbara Harlow Pdf Compressor

She borrowed the book’s title from the Palestinian revolutionary writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani’s 1966 study of literature produced by Palestinians under Israeli military-colonial rule (Kanafani 1966). She challenged the isolationism of area studies and the formalist tendencies of literary criticism that claim literature to be an autonomous arena of activity. Her first book, Resistance Literature (1987), brought together writings of national liberation struggles from Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world. Harlow discussed the writings of revolutionary strugglers, political prisoners and critical dissenters. She defined her practice as deploying the critical perspectives and theories of those she wrote about and with whom she stood in solidarity. She names and took issue with intellectual trafficking in third world narratives as “raw material” to be processed in the first world academy.

Her work challenged the assumption that theory is solely the “domain of the western critic and intellectual” (Harlow 1986a, 1). When she wrote about a figure, she outlined the material-historical conditions of each life to explain how they theorized resistance, dissent, and literature. The author of several edited volumes and numerous articles, essays, and book reviews that crossed geographies and disciplines, Harlow grounded her discussions of anti-imperialist struggle and its cultural politics in “theoretical-historical” or “historicized-theoretical” formulations.

Her work was always critical, generative, and political. Harlow focused on the possibility of producing narratives that challenge conditions of domination and oppression, as well as the disciplinary boundaries and modes of analysis within the academy that supported these conditions and restricted “more comparative and critical ways” of reading and writing. She saw construction and (re)construction of the historical record as part of the process of forging alternative futures. She emphasized the contradictions and debates within these projects as generative of what she called “renewed histories of the future” (Harlow 1996, 10). She entwined them and located emancipatory potential in each even as both were subject to her criticism.

Barbara Harlow and the Necessity of ‘Renewed Histories of the Future’īarbara Harlow’s commitment to struggles for liberation and justice was always at the same time a commitment to academic inquiry.

Resistance Literature Barbara Harlow Pdf Compressor