Buried In The Red Dirt

A vivid account of Palestinian life, death, and reproduction during and since the British colonial period in Palestine.

"Vena Winifred Ellen Rogers, a British nurse, is especially prominent in Palestine Department of Health records given the length of her service as a Matron and Superintendent of Midwifery for the Jerusalem District, which included Jerusalem, Hebron, Bethlehem, Ramallah, Bireh and their villages. Government and non-Jewish "government-aided" maternity and infant welfare centers in the Jerusalem District were accountable to Rogers, who in turn answered to the British Senior Medical Officer (SMO)"--

A classic in contemporary Oklahoma literature, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s Red Dirt unearths the joys and ordeals of growing up poor during the 1940s and 1950s. In this exquisite rendering of her childhood in rural Oklahoma, from the Dust Bowl days to the end of the Eisenhower era, the author bears witness to a family and community that still cling to the dream of America as a republic of landowners.

What is the literary absurd? What are its key textual features? How can it be analysed? How do different readers respond to absurdist literature?Taking the theories and methodologies of stylistics as its underlying analytical framework, Reading the Absurd tackles each of these questions. Selected key works in English literature are examined in depth to reveal significant aspects of absurd style. Its analytical approach combines stylistic inquiry with a cognitive perspective on language, literature and reading which sheds new light on the human experience of literary reading.By exploring the literary absurd as a linguistic and experiential phenomena, while at the same time reflecting upon its essential historical and cultural situation, Joanna Gavins brings a new perspective to the absurd aesthetic.

In Unsettled Labors, Rachel H. Brown explores the overlooked labor of migrant workers in Israel’s eldercare industry. Brown argues that live-in eldercare in Palestine/Israel, which is primarily done by migrant workers, is an often invisible area where settler colonialism is reproduced culturally, economically, and biologically. Situating Israeli labor markets within a longer history of imperialism and dispossession of Palestinian land, Brown positions migrant eldercare within the resulting tangle of Israeli laws, policies, and social discourses. She draws from interviews with caretakers, public statements, court documents, and first-hand fieldwork to uncover the inherently contradictory nature of elder care work: the intimate presence of South and Southeast Asian workers in the home unsettles the idea of the Israeli home as an exclusively Jewish space. By paying close attention to the comparative racialization of migrant workers, Palestinians, asylum seekers, and Mizrahi and Ashkenazi settlers, Brown raises important questions of labor, social reproduction, displacement, and citizenship told through the stories of collective care provided by migrant workers in a settler colonial state.

The old law of ‘an eye for an eye’ leaves everybody blind. – Martin Luther King Jr. Revenge. If you are a power-seeker, revenge can be a tool to remind others not to mess with you. Revenge can also be a way to keep order in a society where rules are weak. But revenge can come at a price. It can be a rusty knife in your back that leaves you dwelling on a spot, unable to move on, an unhappy disfigurement of shame. This collection of short stories, Revenge, puts together 25 very human responses to feeling slighted. Those who can't let go become the prisoners of revenge. But, those who can, can find a positive sense of direction and a new, liberating mission. The collection of short stories weaves itself around the idea of revenge. How to see revenge coming, and how to flee. The desire to take revenge, the guilt, and the confusion. It is all here.

The struggles of an enslaved African woman and two emigrant German farmers generate a sweeping saga of oppression, estrangement, and redeemed memory that binds together America's "Trail of Tears," South Africa's "Great Trek," and our contemporary search for reconciliation.