Hosted by Readers bookshop, this is an event for the launching of Writing Displacement: a 2016 book in post-colonial studies, cultural theory, and world literatures, which investigates the politics of home and identity. A discussion of the book, and the author’s personal experience of writing and displacement will be followed by a short reading and a brief signing session.

The book mainly asks the following questions, using contemporary fiction as a lense:

What is displacement? What is the difference between exile, traveling and, say, expatriation? How can displacement be melancholic and/or celebratory? How thin is the line between nationalism and racism? How imaginary are our homelands? Are we nomads and belong no-where? Or do we always have central gravitation now-here? How does memory and nostalgia intensify our exilic displacement? How much of the past is shadow? And how much of the now is present?

The book has been already cited in library catalogs in universities like Princeton and Stanford and bibliographically cited in MA researches in academia in Europe and the Middle East alike.

Writing Displacement has also been reviewed as “engaging and timely”, “a compelling read”, “a bold attempt to read against any fashionable predilections”, and “offers incisive and original ways of reading into contemporary writing” by the University of London, University of Manchester, Sunderland, and Nottingham Trent.
Writing Displacement, is now available in the US, UK, Italy, Norway, Germany, Poland, New Zealand, Slovenia, Lebanon, Argentine, Australia, China, Slovakia, Canada, and on both leading online stores Amazon and Ebay and other online bookstores around the world.

Writing Displacement was published in 2016 by the leading publishing house in the world Palgrave Macmillan, based in London, New York, Melbourne, Sydney, Hong Kong, Delhi, and Johannesburg. Macmillan publishes across more than 170 journals in humanities, social sciences and economics, and has upheld an unbroken tradition of over 200 years of academic publishing.

Writing Displacement follows on such footsteps as it is the first of its own in literary criticism and world literatures to encompass three generations of displaced writers in English from the Caribbean, Africa, India, Pakistan, and China, and uses Palestinian exilic displacements as a critical tool and compass to find intersecting points of reference with these geographies. From Sam Selvon to Salman Rushdie and Monica Ali, Edward Said to Homi Bhabha and Stuart Hall, the author here reroutes filiation to affiliation. The text troubles the ideas of citizenship and national belonging; it celebrates the freedom to be “out of place” which opens doors for and promotes rediscovery of materials that have been repressed or pushed aside in cultural translation, without falling into mental ghettoisation.

Al Deek also suggests that a Palestinian national identity develops in spite of, and in some cases because of, the obstacles it faced and still face. Palestinian identity cannot be represented or spoken for, nonetheless, because it is a collective narrative of individual narratives and of different generations, of diverse losses. The Palestinian here is not a mere object for academic research, but rather a human subject, with memories and aspirations. This academic research only aspires, therefore, to act as an agent to generally speak to post-colonial displacees and diasporas of India, Pakistan, the Caribbean, Africa and China, and particularly the different displaced generations of the Palestinians.