Affiliation:
1. Kobi Peled is a historian and an architect by training, who studies the cultural history of Palestinian Arab society and the history of relations between Arabs and Jews. His research revolves around four axes: place, memory, oral history and poetry. His latest research concerns Bedouin poetry in the Negev. Peled is a faculty member at the Ben-Gurion Research Institute for the Study of Israel & Zionism at the Sde Boker campus of Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, where he heads the institute’s...
Abstract
Bedouin poetry has yet to be explored in the context of memory studies, let alone the poetry of the Negev Bedouin. This article, based on a corpus of hundreds of poems documented between the mid-1940s and late-1980s, reviews excerpts from ten political verses composed by Negev Bedouin poets. These verses attest to the power of Bedouin poetry to evoke – at times in just a word or two – a wide range of meanings, a historical depth that may be submersed in a few expressions, and the ways in which these expressions activate memories of the past to communicate something of significance about the present.
This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC 4.0 licence:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
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Publisher
Liverpool University Press