Excerpt
The Palestine Writes Literature Festival is set to take place at Penn from Sept. 22 to 24. The festival is a place for Palestinian artists and writers to convene, share their works and narratives, and celebrate Palestinian culture and resilience.
In the world of North American literature, Palestinian and Arab voices suffer from either extensive exclusion and censorship, or exploitative tokenization. This festival is an opportunity for Palestinians, and other marginalized groups, to come together outside of these exhausting barriers and build community around shared experiences, as well as exchange valuable knowledge and art.
For a land and a people who suffer from a history of colonialism, displacement, and erasure, the festival is an extremely important site of cultural preservation. The violence of settler colonialism extends far beyond the reality on the ground in Palestine and pervades every part of Palestinian existence, history, and cultural production. It is a violent machine which seeks to exterminate any semblance of Palestinian existence, including Palestinians’ narrative of their own history. We want and need a space on this campus where we can exist with agency, with our community and our friends from other marginalized communities.
Source:
https://www.thedp.com/article/2023/09/palestine-writes-literature-festival-backlash-harmful-narrative-celebrate-culture