There Where You Are Not

2020 winner
 There Where You Are Not
Publisher: Hirmer Verlag
Published Date: October 2019
ISBN-13: 978-3-7774-3243-4

There Where You Are Not brings together the writings of celebrated Palestinian artist and theorist Kamal Boullata. Produced over four decades of exile in Europe, North Africa, and the United States, the essays explore intersections between aesthetics, history, and politics that are central to the historiography of modern Arab art.

 

Judges' Notes on why this book was shortlisted:

This volume accumulates more than 45 articles written by the Palestinian artist, critic, and theorist Kamal Boullata (1942-2019), on topics ranging from art in Palestine, feminism and gender, language and the visual; to short appraisals of contemporaries such as Mahmoud Darwish, Rashid Hussein, and Paul Guiragossian. Before his passing, Boullata completed layout and design of this volume, but it was edited and published by Finbarr Barry Flood, founder-director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories, and author, among other titles, of The Great Mosque of Damascus: Studies on the Makings of an Umayyad Visual Culture (2000)

Notes by Subhi Hadidi, Judge, Palestine Book Awards 2020
Read the Judges' Notes for all the shortlisted books here.

Review(s):

Reviewed by: Nasim Ahmed

On the very day that Jerusalem came under Israeli occupation in 1967 “exile became a central reality in my life,” recollects Kamal Boullata in the opening passages of the colossal volume that brings together the writings of celebrated Palestinian artist. Only 25 years of age, as Israeli occupation forces rolled into the Holy City, Boullate...

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