Please join us for the next CPPR seminar on 9 December from 1-2pm in WBW G/8. No registration necessary, just come along!

Beginning with the Palestinian and Arab Jewish writers who, in the years after the Nakba and the establishment of the state of Israel, forged a cultural front in the Communist periodicals al-Jadid and al-Ittihad, the project traces how their collaborative practices and anti-colonial communist commitments shaped aesthetic and political forms over subsequent decades.

Hana argues that these projects generate cultural co-resistance: shared imaginative and formal practices through which Palestinians, racialized Jewish communities, and Ashkenazi Jewish leftists sought to build anticolonial cultural solidarity. The work has emerged under profound asymmetries, including the fact that Arab Jewish contributors were positioned both as members of the colonizing society and as subjects of displacement and racialization.

Rooted in translation, radical print, and periodical culture, co-resistant imaginaries were shaped both by transnational anticolonial thought and by cultural resistance to what Swirsky has called the “double annihilation” of the colonial project—the destruction of Palestinian society and of Arab-Jewish cultures and relations. The book traces how cultural co-resistance has transformed across time, producing sparks of anticolonial cultural life within apartheid and colonization.  

Questions? Contact CPPR seminar series organisers Dr Alanah Mortlock or Dr Francesa Meloni.

Please note that this event is only open to current King's students and staff.

About the speaker

Dr Hana Morgenstern is Associate Professor in Global South and Middle Eastern Literatures at Cambridge University and a Fellow at Newnham College. She is a scholar of Middle Eastern literature and cultural histories of the Left, with a specialization in Palestine and Israel, including Jewish, Hebrew, Palestinian and Arabic literatures and literary cultures. Her upcoming book, Cultural Co-Resistance in Palestine/Israel: Anticolonial Literature and Radical Print (EUP, 2026), reconstructs a history of anticolonial Palestinian and Jewish literary and cultural collaborations from the 1950s to the present. Morgenstern is co-founder and co-investigator of Revolutionary Papers, a transnational research collaboration on 20th-century anticolonial and anti-imperial periodicals (https://revolutionarypapers.org/). She is also co-founder of Archives of the Disappeared, an interdisciplinary initiative for the study of communities, social movements, spaces, and cultures destroyed through acts of political repression and mass violence.