"On the Urgency of Radical Palestinian Epistemology" With Amanda Batarseh

Buymeacoffee.com/everythingisideologyPatreon.com/everythingisideology Shownotes: Today I’m joined by Amanda Batarseh, an assistant professor of literature whose teaching and research span Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and diasporic literature, Indigenous Studies, Mediterranean Studies, and comparative literature.Our conversation centers on Batarseh’s work on radical Palestinian epistemology and what she describes as a Palestine-centered way of knowing. Beginning with the limits of simply applying inherited European theoretical frameworks to Palestinian cultural production, Batarseh asks us to consider Palestinian literature not merely as something to be interpreted through theory, but as a site that produces knowledge and theory of its own.From there, we discuss what colonial unknowing: not simply an absence of information about Palestine, but structures of knowledge that can render Palestinian histories, experiences, and claims unintelligible even when Palestinians have narrated those histories for generations. This pushes us beyond the question of who has permission to narrate and toward a deeper question: what determines whether a narrative can be recognized as knowledge in the first place?We also turn to literature, poetry, and imagination as forms of political and epistemological practice. Palestinian cultural production does not simply document oppression; it can preserve relationships to land, transmit memory, create alternative geographies, and imagine forms of life beyond the structures that seek to contain them. Literature, in this sense, becomes a space of radical creativity whose possibilities extend outward from the individual toward collective liberation.This becomes especially important in our discussion of cartography and Batarseh’s concept of rooted movement. Against colonial maps that transform land into bounded territory and property, Palestinian narratives can orient people through memory, movement, story, ancestry, and lived relationships to place. Rootedness, then, does not necessarily mean remaining fixed. Palestinian ways of knowing can be grounded in Palestine while moving across exile, diaspora, language, political struggle, and intellectual traditions.Biography: Amanda Batarseh (بطارسة / bah–taar–say) is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focuses on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies and comparative literature. Her research has been supported by the UC Humanities Research Institute, Hellman Fellowship, Faculty Career Development Program and the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship Program.Links: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0377919X.2026.2683727