Editorial Note

W

hy, in this issue, do we turn deliberately toward armed resistance? Each interview, essay, review, and poem answers this question by attending to the cultural life of struggle, its forms of thought and care, its grief and pride, and the forms of collective relations through which it is sustained. Taken together, these pieces insist that even under conditions designed to foreclose possibility, even under conditions that appear totalizing, people create possibility.

Among our obligations as Westerners, one is straightforward: to honour that creation of possibility, even when—or especially when—it takes the systematically disavowed form of armed resistance. We do this knowing that our psychic, affective, and intellectual lives are themselves contested terrain. We do this knowing that the enemy requires our despair, our detachment, our resignation, our complicity, our disdain for militants and our indulgence of liberalism. Maintaining ideological clarity keeps us alive to each other and to the world, capable of rejecting the existing order and imagining what might be made in its place. Fanon argued that revolutionary violence and struggle were conditions for the emergence of a new humanity, one predicated not on subjugation, supremacy, and wretchedness, but on national sovereignty and popular self-determination.

Taking resistance seriously in all its forms alters what we, as cultural workers, are able to perceive: the violence already structuring ordinary life, and those who fight it as political agents. It asks us to reckon with their commitments and sacrifices, to exceed the narrow conceptual categories Western culture makes available to us, and to develop a language adequate to the possibilities struggle brings into view. It’s the cliche learning, the repeated axiom, still true—still painfully and terribly true—and I write it here with conviction and with immense shame: we are not freeing Palestine; Palestine is freeing us.

We are lucky to have the words of the writers, artists, and intellectuals gathered in this issue. I hope you’ll spend time with them and take seriously what they ask of us.