MESA Banner
Palestinian Spectrality: Teaching Poetry in a Palestinian Catastrophe
Abstract
This study builds on previous work, asked in another phase of the ongoing Nakba, to ask: given the latest genocidal siege on Gaza, how do we teach Palestinian poetry within the western academy while suspended within such a singular catastrophe? I approach the study through several angles, taking material violence such as surging anti-Palestinian institutional censorship and the precarious position of Palestinian literature within mainstream US publishing industry, alongside a regime of Zionist narrative violence which, drawing on Edward Said and Ariella Aïsha Azoulay, is set on the total onto-epistemic annihilation of Palestinians. In confronting the full im/material scale of this colonial violence, taken to mean both on the ground material violence alongside circulations of propaganda, literature, and media weaponized against Palestinian narration of our own history, I hope to ultimately advance a theory of Palestinian spectrality that may inform pedagogical approaches resisting such violence. Against a regime that, effectively, filters an Indigenous Palestinian population out of its archives, what is Palestinian literature's capacity to, as Azoulay calls for, imagine better narrative genres beyond imperial history? How might our pedagogical approach towards Palestinian literature adopt, at its center, a rigorous critical understanding of our necrotically super-saturated landscape, and further, advance formal and analytic tools for understanding the ways in which Palestinian literature actively unfilters and presences our martyrs alongside our living dead (Mbembe, 2019), despite a colonial regime that polices us even in death?
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None