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Diana Allan, Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences of Palestinian Exile. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. 328 pp.
Although the literature on the Palestinian camp of Shatila in Lebanon is already vast, in Refugees of the Revolution, Diana Allan provides a very important and nuanced account of its political economy and the dwellers' tactics of survival and moral resilience to longstanding oppression and exile. The everyday politics of the Shatila camp dwellers, which she foregrounds throughout six chapters, goes beyond right-to-return campaigns, institutional politics, and ritual public commemorations. The past of the Palestinian refugees, for Allan, is no longer something given once and for all and inherited, but rather a performative and situational process. The author challenges the popular assumption that advocating for the Palestinian cause has the limited meaning of supporting the "right to return" of the families of the refugees who were expelled from 1948 onward due to the foundation of the state of Israel (the so-called Nakba).
In Allan's argument, it is not merely the loss of Palestinian land that undermines people's contemporary lives, but the destruction of their social fabric as well as the premature aging of young Palestinians. The Shatila camp embodies much more than a community of memory. Allan, from the introduction on, subtly contests how identity is commonly investigated through a retrospective lens, enfeebling collective memory as an efficacious explanation of the present needs and affects of Shatila's dwellers. As a result, refugee agentivity is internationally framed as merely past-oriented and past-focused, meaning that, with no resolution of their past, the refugees' present acts of resilience are rarely foregrounded. Through analysis of the camp economy of survival and subsistence, Allan shows how focusing on what I would call retrospective nationalism is ultimately an immoral dismissal of the Palestinian cause, in that it limits the latter to a rhetoric of return and nationhood.
By identifying in camp politics one of the sources of people's tangible grievance, Allan marks the 1982 PLO's (Palestinian Liberation Organization) departure from Lebanon as the end of its armed struggle for national liberation, as well as a critical point for a Palestinian laboratory of human rights in Lebanon. In Allan's account, collective dispossession and return are still substantial components of the present condition of refugeehood, but...