The Poetry of Suheir Hammad: Transnational Interventions in the Age of Islamophobia and Digital Media

ENDNOTES

1. Mohanty (1991) contends that “it is the common context of struggle against specific exploitative structures and systems that determines our potential political alliances” (7). Hence, Mohanty challenges the essentialist understanding of identity politics in favor of a politicized understanding of oppositional identity. However, such alliances are not always easy to build as historical instances of the failure to stand in solidarity with other struggles demonstrate.

2. The TED video can be found here: https://www.ted.com/talks/suheir_hammad_poems_of_war_peace_women_power?language=en

3. The dance performance can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_aY4ALfbwg

4. In a previously published article, I define alternative media “as media content that challenges dominant assumptions and offers stylistic innovations for the purpose of inspiring social change. In addition, I argue that alternative media consist of transforming the existing stock of material into one's own language in order to promote social justice” (Oumlil 2016, 41).

5. The poem “Rafah,” performed at the Palestine Festival of Literature 2009, is available as an online video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=21PVTeloXfc, and in the Born Palestinian, Born Black reprint (Hammad 2010).

6. The poem “break,” which opens the collection Breaking Poems (2008), is also available online as a performance video: https://bodyontheline.wordpress.com/2008/03/23/break-by-suheir-hammad/