My paper explores the challenge of syllabus building for a Palestinian literature course centering gender and queerness in a climate of anti-BDS laws, legislative moves against queer literature in many U.S. states, and federal U.S. legislative bodies equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Grounded in gender theory, women’s studies, reception theory, and postcolonial+decolonial thought, I ask, in the context of U.S. university student bodies receiving the course, how to optimize a Palestinian literature syllabus that explores gender fluidity while grounding students in histories of Nakba, Occupation, and genocide. How might text selection balance genre considerations, periodization, the Palestinian literary canon, and productions from the widespread geographies of Palestinian diaspora? This paper maps U.S.-positioned pedagogical strategy through an array of writing that treks from grand heteropatriarchal narratives to new gay stories, from The Time of White Horses to The Skin and Its Girl, but also widening genres from Palestinian folktale of Speak, Bird, Speak Again and the pre-modern gender-bending Epic of Dhat al-Himma (read as a Palestinian heroine) to Minor Detail and the speculative fiction of Nadia Afify and Ibtisam Azem. It explores the pedagogical potential of writerly “filial” pairings such as that of Adania Shibli to Samira Azzam (d. 1967) and Susan Abulhawa’s answer in the form of her novel, Mornings in Jenin, to Ghassan Kanafani’s questions raised in Returning to Haifa, as a means allowing U.S. students to understand the development of Palestinian literary conversations from elder generations to current cohorts.

In his discussion of militarized conflicts, Paul Carr argues that “the human, cultural, and economic cost of war to the environment is substantial,” and that “what is most destabilizing is that the environment is generally not included in calculations of costs and benefits…The media, in lock-step with hegemonic forces, refuses to focus, or are prevented, from focusing on the environment" (''Shock and Awe,” 342). In the face of such systemic blackout, Palestinian cultural productions have portrayed plants, animals, air and water as grievable casualties of violence. Seeking to reframe the discourse of war (and occupation), Palestinian literary and filmic texts often highlight the interconnections between the human and non-human world and the inextricability of economic, social, gender, and environmental injustice. Drawing upon studies in postcolonial ecocriticism, this paper explores representations of environmental insecurity in Palestinian cultural productions, particularly as it relates to the insidious consequences of political conflict, settler colonialism, anti-Palestinian racism, and war. Analyzing contemporary Palestinian texts that speak of precarious environments, including Laila al-Haddad’s Gaza Mom, Atef Abu Saif's The Drone Eats with Me, Burnat and Davidi's documentary Five Broken Cameras and Shomali and Cowen's documentary-animation The Wanted 18, I demonstrate how Palestinian authors and filmmakers have articulated the “apocalyptic now” that Palestinians have endured by means of documenting precarity, but also creative resistance. As they bemoan the suffering and loss of human lives, these texts simultaneously lament the predicament of cows, donkeys, and olive trees, the unlawful usurpation of land and sea, and the toxicity of bombs and drones. Aside from portraying the recurring violations of the environment—epitomized by the 1948 Nakba that sought to sever Palestinians from their land—such texts draw attention to the resilience of humans whose environments may be “precarious,” but who continue to be steadfast in their fight for justice and self-determination. The production of Palestinian counter-narratives that center the natural world—while summoning the Nakba as the quintessential act of human-environment dispossession—demonstrates a prominent environmental consciousness among Palestinian writers. Palestinian cultural productions elucidating environmental degradation also serve to take western environmentalists (preoccupied with recycling and renewable energy) to task by urging them to consider the devastating impact of war, occupation and settler colonialism on Palestinian ecosystems. Such literary and filmic contributions deserve critical attention as they help diversify the fields of ecocriticism and Arab Studies, while also inviting us to incorporate eco-centered pedagogies in our teaching.

Because of the centrality of land and natural resources to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, films about life in the region cannot help but reflect the ways in which the environment has been weaponized in support of Zionist colonialism and the ways in which Palestinians have resisted and countered that weaponization. Elias Suleiman’s films, Chronicle of a Disappearance, Divine Intervention, and The Time that Remains, depict the complex intersection between occupation and environmental justice in which Palestinians reside. Suleiman’s films work to visually represent the spatial restrictions of the Israeli occupation as well as reveal the damage this prolonged and brutal occupation does to the population at large through cinematic techniques and dark humor. Underlying these issues, however, is the fundamental relationship between Palestinians and the land and the frequent attempts of the Zionists and Israeli government to undermine that relationship and deny Palestinians the rights of ecological determination. With Suleiman’s blunt and often darkly ironic approach, the films also reveal gaps in the environmental rhetoric that is used to legitimize the Israeli presence in the region and highlight the environmental failings of the Israeli government. The Palestinian people were forced from their land in 1948 (nakba) and again in 1967 (naksa) by Zionist and Israeli forces who promptly built over or planted over Palestinian villages, essentially weaponizing the environment to meet their colonial ends. The Jewish National Fund, in particular, has been responsible for physically altering the shape of the region’s landscape by planting large forest of non-indigenous trees. The sudden growth of the Israeli population and the shortsighted nature of their development projects has resulted in the contamination and mismanagement of fresh water supplies in the water-scarce region, but the Palestinians are the ones who suffer the brunt of this mismanagement, not the Israeli population. The Palestinians are quite literally fenced off in the West Bank and denied control not only of themselves and their movements, but also over their natural resources and environment, particularly water and agricultural lands. Suleiman’s films encapsulate and give visual representation to fact that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a prime example of where the violence toward and oppression of a people coincides with and results in violence toward and oppression of the environment.

There is a significant consensus on the differences in Palestinian responses towards the Israeli occupation that originate from the implications of national identity discourse and the division imposed by the catastrophe (nakbah) that befell Palestinians in 1948. While most critics and scholars tend to characterize Palestinian subjectivity as a dichotomy of insiders and outsiders, this study analyses the literary representations of Palestinian works that document, in particular, the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity after the June War and occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 and offers a new vision of Palestinian subjectivity that challenges this traditional dichotomy. The complexity of Palestinian subjectivity stems from Palestinians’ relationship with Palestine and its memories, creating overlaps and undercutting among subjectivities, allowing for an array of modes of subjectivities that are not limited to the traditional dichotomy of Palestinian “insiders” and “outsiders,” and constantly furthering boundaries among Palestinians as “them” and “us.” Further, informed by a psychoanalytic approach, the study examines the complex emerging subjectivity and explores the realities from which they originate. Among the works I examine are: Sahar Khalifeh’s Wild Thorns, Ghassan Kanafani's Return to Haifa, and Mourid Barghouthi's I Saw Ramallah. Some of the women characters in these works, I argue, negotiate a mediated space between insiders and outsiders, occupying a third category; other characters move fluidly between all three categories. This study invites further examination of the complexity of Palestinian subjectivity and the variety of responses to violence and oppression in Palestinian literature.

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?

This paper is a close reading of Zeina B. Ghandour’s The Honey. I argue that the novella employs the fantastic in order to create a shift to woman-centered spirituality as a mode of sumud that offers a double critique of Israeli Occupation and patriarchal Palestinian nationalist discourse—all the while centering the Palestinian people’s steadfastness, through staying put on the land, and the Palestinian refugees’ right to return to the land they were expelled from during the Nakba (1948), the Naksa (1967), and throughout decades of Israeli occupation. The novella depicts how this woman-centered spirituality was part of the Palestinian national culture that strongly existed in Palestine before 1948 but disappeared shortly after the 1967 occupation and how this culture unified Palestinian society and strengthened its love of and connection to its ancestral land. I argue that the novella’s recreation of this Palestinian culture from within the context of the second Intifada (2000-2005) foregrounds its importance for reclaiming sumud as the quintessentially Palestinian mode of resistance to a military Occupation bent on emptying Palestine of its indigenous people through killing and expulsion. The novel depicts this culture as enabling the Palestinian people to persist on their land in defiance of the occupation’s agenda of ethnic cleansing. The novella’s depiction of this culture also gnaws at the patriarchal nationalist discourse and its failure to achieve social and national liberation. Ghandour’s depiction of national culture is reminiscent of postcolonial theories of nationalism and feminist theories of home and belonging that make a distinction between “official” nationalist discourse and the emancipatory nature of national culture.