Barbara Harlow and the Necessity of “Renewed Histories of the Future”: In Memoriam (1948–2017)

Barbara Harlow’s commitment to struggles for liberation and justice was always at the same time a commitment to academic inquiry. She entwined the two and located emancipatory potential in both even as both were subject to her criticism. She emphasized the contradictions and debates within these projects as generative of what she called “renewed histories of the future” (Harlow 1996, 10). Harlow focused on the possibility of producing narratives that challenge conditions of domination and oppression, as well as the disciplinary boundaries and modes of analysis within the academy that supported these conditions and restricted “more comparative and critical ways” of reading and writing.¹ Her work was always critical, generative, and political.

The author of several edited volumes and numerous articles, essays, and book reviews that crossed geographies and disciplines, Harlow grounded her discussions of anti-imperialist struggle and its cultural politics in “theoretical-historical” or “historicized-theoretical” formulations. When she wrote about figures, she outlined the material-historical conditions of their lives to explain how they theorized resistance, dissent, and literature. Her work challenged the assumption that theory is solely the “domain of the western critic and intellectual” (Harlow 1986a, i). She named and took issue with intellectual trafficking in Third World narratives as “raw material” to be processed in the First World academy. She defined her practice as deploying the critical perspectives and theories of those she wrote about and with whom she stood in solidarity.

Harlow discussed the narratives produced by revolutionary struggles, political prisoners, and figures of critical dissent. Her first book, Resistance Literature (1987), brought together writings of national liberation struggles from Africa, Latin America, and the Arab world. She challenged the isolationism of area studies and the formalist tendencies of literary criticism that claim literature to be an autonomous arena of activity. She borrowed the book’s title from the Palestinian revolutionary writer and critic Ghassan Kanafani’s (1966) study of literature produced by Palestinians under Israeli military-colonial rule. Her essay “Egyptian Intellectuals and the Debate on the ‘Normalization of Cultural Relations’” with Israel is informed by Kanafani’s refusal of “cultural ‘cooperation’ with the enemy” (Harlow 1986b, 36). Literary and cultural production, she argued alongside Arab intellectuals, are never politically neutral. As a scholar in the Western academy, she cautioned against academic practices that may “become just one more example of cultural imperialism or renewed cultural invasion” (58).

Harlow engaged with Kanafani’s work on its own national liberationist terms. She translated into English and introduced a collection of his short stories (Kanafani 1984) and did the same, with Nejd Yeziji, for a public lecture he gave to Arab intellectuals and writers in the wake of the naksa, the 1967 Arab defeat that resulted in Israeli colonization of additional Palestinian, Syrian, and Egyptian lands (Kanafani 1990). Harlow (1990) located Kanafani’s critique of “blind language”—where terms such as revolutionary, justice, and freedom have no meaning, specificity, or connection to a clear anti-imperial praxis—to the political debates of its time and to her contemporary moment. In addition to Kanafani, she often drew on other revolutionary actors such as Amílcar Cabral, Roque Dalton, and Ruth First, all assassinated because of their resistance work. Harlow’s question—if they were alive today, “are there not still those who would feel it necessary to assassinate them?”—is to remind us of the continuing urgency and relevance of politically engaged work and words. A little over a month after Harlow died, on March 6, 2017, thirty-one-year-old Basil al-Araj was assassinated by the Israeli Army during a raid in Ramallah because of his commitment to revolutionary struggle. Described by Palestinians as an “engaged intellectual,” al-Araj was imprisoned by the Palestinian Authority (PA) in coordination with the Israeli authorities in April 2016 after he and others were accused of reviving the armed struggle. A vocal critic of PA politics and its structural complicity with Israeli colonialism, al-Araj brought to life the history of Palestinian anticolonial resistance through his local oral history tours, organizing with activists, and...