The Spectral Palestinian

Reviews / Votes

Against a Zionist regime that shrinks Palestinian worldhood, The Spectral Palestinian foregrounds defiant Palestinian voices who poetically and materially refuse their containment and determination from without. Mobilizing Sari Nusseibeh, Mahmoud Darwish, and Raja Shehadeh in the struggle against settler erasure, this invaluable book shows clearly that Palestinians' hunger for liberation persists, despite or even because of multiple setbacks, failures, and disclosures of vulnerability. While Israel's genocidal project anxiously seeks to invisibilize the Palestinian by any means necessary, LeBlanc unearths in this figure's haunting non-being, its spectrality, a subversive reality that relentlessly frustrates and upends Zionist frames of intelligibility, calling for new and inventive ways of thinking the predicament of Palestinians politically. -- Zahi Zalloua, Cushing Eells Professor of Philosophy and Literature and Professor of Indigeneity, Race, and Ethnicity Studies, Whitman College, USA The uncertain status of Palestinians as humans worthy of flourishing lives is a result of decades of being regarded as a people without a history, without claim to a home, without voice, and without a right to resist erasure. The importance of Randy LeBlanc's work lies in the space he creates for Palestinian thinkers, writers and activists to take control over the marginalized and spectral condition to which they have been relegated. LeBlanc's readings of Raja Shehadeh, Sari Nussibeh, and Mahmoud Darwish are careful, respectful, interesting, and evocative. Their words challenge the displacement and invisibility of Palestinians with courage. They demand a world where they and their families can be safe and free once conquest in the name of self-defense is exposed as illegitimate and genocidal. The Spectral Palestinian is an illuminating and timely work of political theory. -- Christopher C. Robinson, Clarkson University, USA John Randolph LeBlanc's work utilizes a range of literature to question the efficacy, dexterity, and usefulness of our interdisciplinary categories in order to explore precarity, inhumanity, and to urge us to read from the viewpoint of the spectral"other." Such reading helps us to recognize our own vulnerabilities and to enter the logic of the counter-narrative, potentially, to create change. Fluent and wise, this book should upset our reliance on standard solutions to complex problems and place us in a cooperative attitude that LeBlanc opens in his conclusion: to put the concepts on the table and ask how we must attend to them so as not to render "others" spectral. -- Carolyn M. Jones Medine, University of Georgia, USA