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by Jeffrey Sacks (Author)
Showing how poetry and art articulate forms of life beyond settler colonialism.
Back Jacket
"Jeffrey Sacks writes with such fluent intensity, with an erudition so broad and so focused, that he reveals a mode of reading that seizes the time and is unheld by it, that defends the land and is unbound to it, thereby discerning and advancing a specific poetics of Palestinian insurgency that is and bears a planetary gift that genocidal settlement can't steal--the great goodness of life. There is no right to refuse such beautiful and terrible refusal."--Fred Moten, New York University
"It is not only that Sacks shows settler life to exceed the settler's life in the colony. It is not only that he tracks settler life's linguistic and philosophical practices, sustained by social and juridical forms, and pressed-out at the world in the manner of a counterinsurgent attack. By attuning the reader to an 'anontological form' emerging from Arab and Arabic ways of doing language, possessing neither property nor self, Sacks also gathers poetic withdrawals from settler life. The result is an opening--a struggle, a reanimated tradition--that refuses division and mastery."--Samera Esmeir, University of California, Berkeley "Will you not memorize a little poetry to halt the slaughter?" the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish wrote. Darwish's poetic statement points to world-evacuating and genocidal violences--in a triangulation of Palestine, Iraq, and the American settler state--as his language recalls us to a sonority in utterance and acts of refusal in collective form. Through readings of Arabic and Arab poetry, art, translation, and philosophy, Jeffrey Sacks illumines an indetermined, non-accumulative, non-propertied manner of lingual doing, where language is a practice in sociality, the social is indistinct from the ontological, and being is a poetic mode--what this book calls "poeticality." Settler life--a form of life, a practice of reading, and an asymmetric distribution of social destruction--asserts itself as a generalized and regulating attack upon Black and Indigenous life. In face of this self-assertion, Poeticality affirms the demand for Indigenous sovereignty, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, and elsewhere, a demand which, through the collective acts occasioned in it, decomposes and deposes all sovereign forms and all stately legalities, in refusal of settler life. Jeffrey Sacks is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside.Author Biography
Jeffrey Sacks is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Riverside. He is the author of Iterations of Loss: Mutilation and Aesthetic Form, al-Shidyaq to Darwish (Fordham, 2015), which won the Harry Levin Prize First Book Prize from the ACLA, and translator of Mahmoud Darwish's Why Did You leave the Horse Alone? (Archipelago, 2006).
