After lives

History holds many examples of political activists who have paid for their politics with their lives. From military suppressions to secretly engineered assassinations, the price of revolutionary politics is often dear, especially when the revolutionaries are writers, whose only offences against the state are their words. In a powerful study of three victims of political assassination, Barbara Harlow explores the intricate relations between politically engaged imaginative writing and participation in revolutionary struggles. Ghassan Kanafani in Palestine, Roque Dalton in El Salvador and Ruth…