Captive Revolution: Palestinian Women’s Anti-Colonial Struggle Within the Israeli Prison System
Friday, January 9, 2015
6:30 PM – 9 PM
Room 7000, Simon Fraser University Harbour Center
515 West Hastings, Vancouver, BC
Sponsored by SFU Anthropology and Sociology Departments, Independent Jewish Voices and rabble.ca
Endorsed by Samidoun Palestinian Prisoner Solidarity Network, Boycott Israeli Apartheid Campaign, Red Sparks Union
Launch of Nahla Abdo’s new book, Captive Revolution:
Women throughout the world have always played their part in struggles against colonialism, imperialism and other forms of oppression. However, there are hardly any academic books on Arab political prisoners, fewer still on the Palestinians who have been detained in their thousands for their political activism and resistance.
Nahla Abdo’s Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolutions, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance. Based on the stories of the women themselves, Abdo draws on a wealth of oral history and primary research in order to analyse Palestinian women’s anti-colonial struggle, their agency and their treatment as political detainees.
Making crucial comparisons with the experiences of women political detainees in other conflicts, and emphasising the vital role Palestinian political culture and memorialisation of the ‘Nakba’ have had on their resilience and resistance, Captive Revolution is a rich and revealing addition to our knowledge of this little-studied phenomenon.
‘With Captive Revolution, Nahla Abdo reveals just how much of the history of anti-imperialist struggles is absent when women — especially Palestinian women freedom fighters — are overlooked. In the process of reconstructing this history through testimonies of Palestinian women political detainees, Abdo offers us incisive critiques of orientalist feminisms and of the persistence of racism in the Israeli occupation of Palestine.’ — ANGELA DAVIS, Distinguished Professor Emerita, History of Consciousness and Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz
Nahla Abdo is an Arab feminist activist and Professor of Sociology at Carleton University. She has published extensively on women, racism, nationalism, and the State in the Middle East, with a special focus on Palestinian women. Captive Revolution seeks to break the silence on Palestinian women political detainees, providing a vital contribution to research on women, revolution, national liberation and anti-colonial resistance.
