Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine, Rachel Dedman

In Stitching the Intifada: Embroidery and Resistance in Palestine, the craft of tatreez—traditional Palestinian hand-embroidery—is brought into focus as a subtle yet potent political gesture. Beginning with the rich regional variations of historic Palestinian dress and weaving through the upheavals of the 1948 Nakba and the later uprisings, the volume reveals how stitches become statements, motifs become maps of identity, and garments become sites of steadfast resistance. One encounters clothing not just as textile but as archive—threads bearing communal memory, registers of loss, symbols of endurance—and the book invites the reader to slow-see the crossed threads, the pattern shifts, the symbolic palette of olive branches, maps and national colours transformed into fabric. In doing so it offers a tactile history of resistance, rooted in the materiality of cloth and the power of the maker’s hand.

More than a catalogue or history, this book is a manifesto of craft as commentary: the private labor of embroidery is shown to shift into the public sphere of protest, where women’s stitching becomes a form of agency. The author traces how tatreez evolved—from village practice to a visual language of national belonging—and how artists and makers across generations have re-imagined that language for the contemporary moment. With 80 pages of thoughtful layout (210 × 125 mm) and donated proceeds going to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the book is modest in size but rich in urgency.

About the Author
Rachel Dedman is a curator, writer and art historian whose research investigates the material and political lives of things—especially within the Global South. Since 2019 she has been the Jameel Curator of Contemporary Art from the Middle East at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, and has curated major exhibitions including Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery. Her work on tatreez and Palestinian textile arts brings out how embroidery functions as memory, resistance and making.

Publication date: 2024
Publisher:  Common Threads Press
Pages: 80
ISBN: 9781068625015