The dispossession and removal of three-quarter of a million Palestinians during the Nakba of 1947-9 dismembered Palestinian society and robbed it of the geographic integrity it once enjoyed. This event destabilized past narratives of Palestinian nationalism and spelled the demise of pre-1948 elites. Exile, therefore, opened the intellectual field to new national imaginaries and literary experimentations. Through a survey of Palestinian reflections on exile as they appeared in Beirut’s cultural journals and periodicals, I analyze how literary traditions fashion the national-self and how a Palestinian nation was written. This wave of literature spans the two decades separating Nakba from Naksa, the so-called lost years of Palestinian history (1948-67). To make better sense of the relation between nation and writing, I take literary criticism as the object of my study and examine how Beirut-based Palestinian intellectuals advocated for certain forms of writing to achieve national liberation as opposed to others. In 1953, the inaugural issue of al-Adab – one of the Arab World’s foremost literary and cultural journals – stated that literary criticism presented a medium through which Arab writers can engage in and contribute to global debates on literature and politics and that as a tradition it would receive “utmost care” within the journal’s pages. Despite such statements, intellectual histories of the Middle East have yet to produce a study focusing on literary criticism, its debates, and its contributors. This paper fills this gap by examining the literary theories and criticism posed by Palestinian writers over the 1950s and 1960s. It will connect the critical writings of Ghassan Kanafani, Fadwa Touqan, Samira ‘Azzam, Ihsan ‘Abbas, Jabra I. Jabra, Issa Boullata, and Tawfiq Sayigh against a Beiruti intellectual backdrop, which featured the likes of Suhail and ‘Aida Idriss, Khalida Said, Adonis, Yusuf al-Khal, Laila Baalbaki, Unsi al-Hajj, Hussein Mruwwah, and Raeef Khuri. From Beirut, Palestinian writers innovated styles inspired by their experience of exile at the same time as they attempted to resolve its contradictions and alienating effects. In linking movements in literary criticism and Palestinian intellectual history to processes of nation-making and nation-writing after 1948, the paper will close with a discussion of Edward Said that situates him in his Palestinian genealogy. Here, I maintain that Said’s notion of literature as “hopelessly involved in politics” builds upon a rich Palestinian literary tradition that preceded him which interrogated exile by redefining the relationship between the national and the literary.

It is difficult to imagine a clearer anti-sectarian demand than for the abolition of sectarian political representation in Lebanon. In August 1975, the Lebanese National Movement (al-?araka al-Wa?aniyya al-Lubn?niyya), a coalition of political parties, movements, and independent figures representing an ideologically diverse, multisectarian constituency, released its "Transitional Program for the Democratic Reform of the Political System in Lebanon." Promulgated during the opening rounds of what became a fifteen-year international civil war, the program was the culmination of at least a decade of polarizing popular struggle. Calling for "a progressive, democratic, Arab nationalist Lebanon," it detailed a suite of comprehensive changes to the political system, premised upon the abolition of sectarian representation and the declaration of a voluntary civil personal status code. LNM leader Kamal Jumblatt argued the events of 1975-76 were "our 1789," a Lebanese equivalent of a republican revolution against a privileged aristocracy-despite his own lesser position within this elite. Using Lebanese and American archives and interviews, this paper considers the efforts of the LNM to push its program in the political sphere and on the battlefield. It places the LNM's struggle to persuade other forces to adopt it-and then impose it by accomplished fact-within the context of the countermoves on the local level by the Christian and Muslim conservative elite, counterrevolutionary parties, and some of the LNM's constituent groups and tenuous Palestinian allies; on the regional level, by Syria and Israel; and on the imperial level, by the United States. Many-perhaps most-myths of the war spring out of this period, and we must return to the rhetoric and images of the participants, understand the chronological and dialectical evolution of the contending forces, in order to understand the period on its own terms. Against a historiography that either dismisses the venture as predestined to fail, or only considers the period within the shackles of post-defeat melancholia, this presentation reevaluates the history of one of the most explicit emancipatory challenges to the Arab order.

Through the lens of two Palestinian museum histories, this paper sketches out political, economic, and ideological shifts in Palestinian cultural production from the anti-imperial solidarity efforts of the 1960s and 1970s, to current debates that measure culture against market logic. Weaving an indeterminate link between the recently established Palestinian Museum, and an unrealized museum plan for Palestine, initiated in the 1970s by the Palestinian Liberation Organisation Plastic Arts Section, this paper traces shifts in the political economy of cultural production. I consider how such shifts have introduced new processes of ‘“transnational cultural brokering” (Yudice, 1996), enabled by private and international investment by cultural intermediaries, at home and abroad. By looking back to the 1970s when artistic production was driven by a shared political vision for the future—strengthened by a transnational solidarity movement—it offers a counterpoint to consider how cultural production today has moved closer to the interests of a neoliberal(izing) art industry. I begin by examining the 1978 International Art Exhibition for Palestine in Beirut—a notable, and until recently, undocumented exhibition history that set in motion a seed collection for a ‘Museum of Solidarity with Palestine’. Enabled by the collective efforts of Arab and international artists, the exhibition would remain itinerant until the works could be repatriated to Palestine. Although much of the collection for the exhibition was destroyed during Israel’s siege of Beirut in 1982, a partial reclamation of its history has been brought into curatorial focus through the extensive research efforts of Kristine Khouri and Rasha Salti through an archival and documentary exhibition titled Past Disquiet: Narrative and Ghosts from the International Art Exhibition for Palestine. It is within this ruptured art historical narrative that I situate my discussion of the Palestinian Museum which opened in Birzeit in May 2016. Through an interrogation of the processes that brought the Palestinian Museum into being, this paper seeks to develop a discourse on the political in contemporary Palestinian art today. Drawing on the archival material of the 1978 exhibition, as well as interviews with art interlocutors in Beirut and Palestine, I consider whether the Museum’s position within a networked art market offers the potential for new political and artistic alliances to be formed. Or, whether reinforcing the capitalist logic of market integration that dominates cultural development today, risks neutralizing, or indeed placating, more radical forms of expression and political critique.