Shir Alon is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Minnesota.
Static Forms is one of the most dynamic, invigorating, erudite books I’ve read about contemporary Middle Eastern literature. Alon teaches us how to read the story of Palestinian “ongoing Nakba,” or violence in Egypt, Israel, and Lebanon, with an eye toward the literature of resistance. It is the literary form, she shows, that exposes the “suspended present” of occupation and oppression, and how they cannibalize our past, present, and future. -- Nitzan Lebovic, author of <i>Homo Temporalis: German-Jewish Thinkers on Time</i>