Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation

Romeo and Juliet in Palestine: Teaching Under Occupation
Publisher: Zero Books
Published Date: June 2015
ISBN-13: 978-1782796374

Is 'Romeo and Juliet' a love story, or a play about young people living in dangerous circumstances? How might life under occupation produce a new reading of 'Julius Caesar'? What choices must a group of Palestinian students make, when putting on a play which has Jewish protagonists? And why might a young Palestinian student refuse to read?

For five months at the start of 2013, Tom Sperlinger taught English literature at the Abu dis campus of al-Quds university in the occupied west bank.

In this account of the semester, Sperlinger explores his students' encounters with works from 'hamlet' and 'the yellow wallpaper' to Kafka and Malcolm x. By placing stories from the classroom alongside anecdotes about life in the west bank, Sperlinger shows how his own ideas changed during his time in Palestine, and asks what such encounters reveal about pedagogy and the role of a university under occupation.

Author(s):

Winners of the Palestine Book Awards

  • They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom
  • I Sing From the Window of Exile
  • Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity
  • Transnational Palestine: Migration and the Right of Return before 1948
  • Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir
  • Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza
  • Tolerance Is a Wasteland: Palestine and the Culture of Denial
  • Reclaiming Humanity in Palestinian Hunger Strikes : Revolutionary Subjectivity and Decolonizing the Body
  • Psychoanalysis under occupation: practicing resistance in Palestine
  • Power born of dreams: my story is palestine
  • Al-Haq: A Global History of the First Palestinian Human Rights Organization
  • Sambac Beneath Unlikely Skies
  • Places of Mind: A life of Edward Said
  • Except for Palestine: The limits of progressive politics
  • A history of Palestinian Islamic Jihad: Faith, awareness, and revolution in the middle east
  • Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands
  • Against the Loveless World
  • The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017
  • Life in a Country Album
  •  There Where You Are Not