A Conversation with the author Amanda Batarseh about Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space (Syracuse UP, 2026).

Present in the heart of modern Palestinian literature is a pervasive sense of rootedness, sustained and nurtured by a deep care for land stewardship and embedded in a spatialized history. In Rooted Movements, Amanda Batarseh examines the epistemology of Palestinian Indigeneity based in a radical relationship to place. Against a colonial logic that often centers displacement as the chief lens through which to understand Palestinian connection to place and spatialized existence, Batarseh argues that Palestinian literature poses Indigeneity as a dialectic relying as much upon rootedness as on ideas of movement.

In elaborating this tension, Batarseh develops a methodology of reading Palestinian literature that foregrounds how Palestinians negotiate space and removal through liberatory mobilization and not as a symptom of zionist, colonial violence. Reading the poetry, creative nonfiction, essays, novels, and films of writers in Palestine and in exile—from Ghassan Kanafani to Naomi Shihab Nye, Hussein Barghouthi, Raja Shehadeh, Ibtisam Azem, and Randa Jarrar—she exposes the limitations of focusing on the geopolitical borders of a modern nation-state and offers alternative imaginaries not bound by colonial spatial control. Instead, the Palestinian poetics of space Batarseh articulates engage rooted movement as an Indigenous expression of deep-seated and enduring connections to place. Palestine, this place, is not static, enclosed by military boundaries, or frozen in time before or after the Nakba, but generative and looking toward a Palestinian future.

Books and Artists mentioned in the Podcast:

• Leila El-Haddad: here
• Dana Barqawi: here

Amanda Batarseh is an assistant professor of literature at the University of California, San Diego, where her research and teaching focus on Palestinian literature with a broader focus on Arab cultural production in and outside of Arabic, Indigenous studies, and Mediterranean studies.

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Edward Blum interviews John William Nelson, Muddy Ground: Native Peoples, Chicago’s Portage, and the Transformation of a Continent (UNC Press, 2023)

In early North America, carrying watercraft—usually canoes—and supplies across paths connecting one body of water to another was essential in the establishment of both Indigenous and European mobility in the continent’s interior. The Chicago portage, a network of overland canoe routes that connected the Great Lakes and Mississippi watersheds, grew into a crossroads of interaction as Indigenous and European people vied for its control during early contact and colonization. John William Nelson charts the many peoples that traversed and sought power along Chicago’s portage paths from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, including Indigenous Illinois traders, French explorers, Jesuit missionaries, Meskwaki warriors, British officers, Anishinaabe headmen, and American settlers. Nelson compellingly demonstrates that even deep within the interior, power relations fluctuated based on the control of waterways and local environmental knowledge.

Pushing beyond political and cultural explanations for Indigenous-European relations in the borderlands of North America, Nelson places environmental and geographic realities at the center of the history of Indigenous Chicago, offering a new explanation for how the United States gained control of the North American interior through a two-pronged subjugation of both the landscapes and peoples of the continent.

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS’ CHOICE • In a groundbreaking global exploration of the ideas that drove the American Revolution, a prize-winning historian shines a light on the defiance of marginalized peoples all over the world.

In her powerful new history of the American Revolution, Sarah M. S. Pearsall argues that the American Founding Fathers did not have a unique claim on the revolutionary spirit. The thirteen colonies that became the United States, she reminds us, were not even half of the British colonies that existed in the eighteenth century. In her sparkling and original Freedom Round the Globe, Pearsall uncovers the insurgents, freedom lovers, and dreamers in India, West Africa, North America, Europe, China, and West Indian islands who shaped the nature of American rebellion and nationhood.

In each fresh and compelling chapter of Freedom Round the Globe: A World History of the American Revolution (Doubleday, 2026), Pearsall plucks a keyword from the Declaration of Independence—security, happiness, respect– finding its spark in a far-flung place. In an Edinburgh club where women were first invited into philosophical conversations, she explores what the pursuit of happiness meant to women and men of all sorts. She traces how novel forms of slavery provoked a new use of the word liberty in Connecticut petitions as well as in cries of “liberty or death.” On a Kolkata street where Indians protested relentless taxes, Pearsall finds a critique of oppressive imperial government that galvanized Americans in their protests and parties against the tea of the English East India Company. In rural Germany, boy soldiers sent abroad to die for Britain complicate who can lay claim to being civilized in a brutal war.

In telling the extraordinary tales of Friends of Liberty protesting tyranny around the world, Pearsall restores these individuals and movements to their rightful place in the vital story of the American Revolution and the nation it created. The result is a stirring and surprising revisioning of our history.

Sarah M. S. Pearsall is an award-winning historian with degrees from Yale, Harvard, and Cambridge, where she taught for nearly a decade. She is a professor and Chair of the Department of History at Johns Hopkins. She wrote this book as both a National Endowment for the Humanities Public Scholar and Distinguished Fellow in the American Revolution at the British Library.

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