Global Trends in Palestinian Literature - Palestinian Literature as Global: Past, Present and Future
Panel VII-14, 2020 Annual Meeting
On Thursday, October 8 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
The making of Palestinian literature has surpassed national borders as of two key historical moments: the Nahda of the 19th century and the Nakba of 1948. Partaking in both Western and Middle Eastern literary worlds, Palestinian literature displays multiple ongoing trajectories of displacement influenced by different socio-economic conditions in the various geographical, cultural, and linguistic settings that house today's Palestinians. This panel proposes to explore Palestinian writings across time, borders, languages, and generations at the intersection between the global and the local. Participants will address different themes at this intersection for the purpose of rethinking the postcolonial and global status of these writings.
The participants will cover a broad range of topics on the relationship between national and international literary exchanges. Panelists will, for instance, offer a global comparative outlook with which to historicize Palestinian literature; another will present new computational approaches for visualizing the ongoing discrepancy between the global circulation of certain Palestinian literary texts and those that remain confined to local national contexts; or, they focus on how Palestinian literary productions in different locations present linguistically and culturally distinct narrations of deterritorialization which both represent the ongoing proliferation of Palestinian experiences and challenge the fundamental idea of an immutable Palestinian identity; other panelists wish to situate the genre of Palestinian literature in the Global Long decade of the 1960s for the pupose of addressing literary expression on humanistic questions about life, perseverance, and fear of oblivion.
The participants converge on the idea that the growing diversity of Palestinian literary expression necessitates serious discussions about new critical approaches and methodologies. The organizers wish to invite participants and auditors to an engaged conversation about the political, aesthetic, and scholarly difficulties in studying Palestinian culture in the various contexts both inside and outside Israel-Palestine.
The intellectual history of the Middle East is interwoven into the revolutionary history of the global 1960s. However, while it is useful to read this history from the perspective of the New Left and its adaptation in the Middle East, there are dimensions of Palestinian discourse in this period that cannot be explained solely through these political-ideological lenses. A multidisciplinary reading in Palestinian intellectual history of the 1960s, combining the works of academics and literary authors, shows that the Palestinians perceived the results of the 1967 war in epistemic and ontological terms: that is the 1967 war made it clear to Palestinians that Israel is capable of physically erasing Palestine, as well as its history. Moreover, Palestinian response to the war could be described as a fear of epistemic erasure, or total oblivion.
Building on the findings of this work, this paper brings together the fields of literature and intellectual history in order to present a more nuanced understanding of Palestinian and Middle Eastern history since the 1960s. In other words, this paper will present the literary manifestations of Palestinian fear of oblivion and the way they intersect with intellectual and academic trends vis-a-vis exemplary works from world literature from this period. The questions that this paper comes to address is: if Palestinians (and Arabs) have been influenced by the same intellectual trends of the Long 1960s, does this mean they share similar literary themes and trends as in world literature? How does Palestinian literature compare to world literature in the 1960s, and what are the similarities and particularities of literary expressions in this period, and what do they tell us about existing intellectual history of the era?
What propels a certain literary text to enter the global circulation of translation and distribution – while others remain confined to national, monolingual circles? This paper juxtaposes Palestinian literary texts that achieved status across the Western and Arab worlds, alongside Palestinian writings that resist such global journeys. Reflecting on the advantages and limitations of textual translatability and authorial mobility, I tease out the various elements of literary capital when it comes to Palestinian literature. I will base my paper on initial findings from Shatature, a digital humanities project that I manage, which sets out to map Palestinian literature as a global phenomenon. Rather than contextualizing Palestinian literature against the backdrop of its many “host” cultures, Shatature focuses on Palestinian literature as a unitary, independent – albeit international and multilingual – literary system, by digitally visualizing its production and reception on an interactive, searchable map. After presenting Shatature, I will offer preliminary interpretations of its database, in order to discuss particular examples of authors who traveled far and those who stayed close to home.
My paper will position Palestinian literature and culture in an earlier chronology to include the flourishing cultural production of the end of the 19th century and early 20 th century in Palestine and the Sham region. This implies a review of the role of Palestinian udabâ such as Khalil Baydas (1874-1949), Issa Nassar (1878-1950) Kalthoum Odeh (1892 -1965), Skandar al-Khouri al-Betjali (189-1873), and particularly those who attended the Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society (IOPS) since they became active into modernizing the Arabic language, writing modern novels, creating a dynamic cultural and political press as well as initiating an
important field of literary translation from Russian and other European languages into Arabic. Most importantly they have laid the foundations for the modern Palestinian literature with all that it may imply in terms of a national identity in its early formation. This period remains crucial for understanding Palestinian culture in its long historical process which already implied, since the 19 th century, multilingualism and displacement. It is even more central for grasping its impact in the making and the “Beginning” process of the dynamic culture of the Palestinians in Israel since 1948 in the heart of the dominant Hebrew cultural space.
Based on my recently-published book on Israeli and Palestinian literature, I will offer a new global comparative outlook with which to historicize Palestinian literature and grasp its political import. The paper will show that with the neoliberal transformation, taking effect in Palestine after the Oslo Accords, Palestinian imaginary worlds and their concept of freedom presuppose a new liberal subject, a new mode of experiencing the world and especially politics. This new literary form, while embedded in diverse local settings and problems, shares in a global reality and joins a new global literature. The distinctive aesthetic and political dimension of such new works concerns the form of their imaginary world: if until the neoliberal turn, Palestinian worlds were an object of collective making, now the world is experienced as a text to be read, a ready-made reality protagonists survey and decipher. Examples will be given from Adania Shibli's Touch and Selma Dabbagh's Out of It.
This paper will address specific literary consequences of Palestinian displacement. Due to the different authors’ daily engagement in the languages of local majorities in Israel and other varied locations in the West, their works are commonly characterized by the authors’ attempt at preserving cultural boundaries and reproducing national sentiments both against the backdrop and under the influence of external cultural elements. The talk will focus on how Hebrew, Latinate, Anglophone, and Nordic Palestinian literary productions respectively present linguistically and culturally distinct narrations of deterritorialization which, on one hand, represent the ongoing proliferation of Palestinian experiences in different contexts and, on the other, challenge the fundamental idea of an immutable Palestinian identity that lies at the core of the national script.
