Palestinian political prisoners : identity and community / Esmail Nashif.

"First published in 2008. Transferred to Digital Printing 2010."--T.p. verso of paperback ed

Includes bibliographical references (pages 218-225) and index.

Introduction: slippery position(s), unsettled setting(s) -- The position(s) -- The research -- The community -- The book -- Notes on gender, language, and politics -- Claiming the colonial -- History of the conflict -- The war of June 1967: recognizing colonialism in Palestine -- Conclusion -- Building the community: the body, the material conditions, and the communication networks -- Introduction -- The history as told and written -- The body of the community -- Conclusion -- Structures of a revolutionary pedagogy: instituting signification -- Introduction -- Writing the history of the prison -- Dissecting the practices from the arrested social body -- Some concluding remarks -- The textual formation of subjects: interrogation as a rite of passage -- Introduction -- A manual for the novice -- Tracing the discursive formations -- Conclusion -- The hidden intellectual: lecturing political captivity -- Introduction -- Lecturing captivity: agency, self and linguistic activities -- Textual strategies and structures: the architecture of the lecture -- The intellectual colonial junctures of Palestine: the unbearable lightness of resolutions -- Conclusion -- The three domains: the aesthetic representing and forming of the national -- Introduction -- The context of novelizing the hidden -- Tracing the threads of the novelistic practices -- The possibilities of world vision(s) -- Conclusion.

Since the occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip in 1967, more than a quarter of the Palestinians have been imprisoned by Israel on political grounds. This is the first major study that examines the community of Palestinian political prisoners in the Israeli prison system. Esmail Nashif explicates the processes that transformed this colonial system into a Palestinian generative site for constructing national, social, and cultural identities. Based on ethnographic, archival, and textual data, the book explores the material conditions of the prison, the education system, organizational structure, and the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of the community{u2019}s building processes. Like other political prisoners in the late colonial era, in the Arab World, and South Africa, the Palestinian prisoners over-invested in meaning production and its related techniques of reading, writing and interpretation in order to regain their historical agency. This community came to be one of the major sites of the Palestinian national movement, and as such reshaped the realities of the Palestine/Israel conflict at many levels that challenged both the Palestinian national movement and the Israeli authorities. Theoretically grounded, well-written and illuminating, this book covers a field which is not very recurrent in the academic works and is certain to advance Palestinian scholarship substantially.