In light of numerous statements by Palestinian and allied writers on the felt inadequacy of language to respond to the images of extreme violence coming from Israel’s genocidal campaign against Gaza beginning October 2023 and the simultaneous push from the right to empty the legal terms invoked to hold Israel accountable to international law of their meaning, what can language provide us as we bear witness to extended genocide? What purpose can the practice of literature—which requires time and solitude—serve in such a moment, when with every passing minute, more Palestinians are murdered, injured, and displaced? Simultaneously, a battle occurs on a different form of language at the hands of mainstream news media and the politicians: the Arabic word “intifada” was mistranslated to mean a genocide of Jews in United States Congress; pundits on the right and center left have claimed that to invoke words such as “genocide” and “apartheid” in the context of Israel’s occupation of Palestine renders them meaningless. This paper argues that these two seemingly disparate reactions are in fact linked. The speechlessness in the face of violence and attempts to obfuscate the precision of legal terms constitute two sides of the same violence through which colonialism wages war on language, cultural meaning, and morality. I thus return to Adania Shibli’s Minor Detail [Tafsil Thanawi] and Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade [L’amour, la fantasia], alongside theoretical works such as Elaine Scarry’s The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Edward Said’s The Question of Palestine, and Noura Erakat’s Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, in probing the limits and possibilities of language in moments of prolonged, extreme violence. Language in these texts is inextricably tied to violence; they each present a different model or case study of how language is manipulated in violence, whether in the gaps and silences of official archives or the loopholes of legal interpretation. This paper develops a theory of ethical engagement with language during violence through these texts and applies it to our current debates, arguing that the dual loss of language occurring as we witness active genocide is both a branch of this same violence and an avenue through which it can be understood and held accountable.

Assia Djebar’s “Algerian quartet,” a series of four novels which chart her exilic relation of belonging to Algerian history and culture, is usually analyzed through a postcolonial tropology of fragmentation and liminality, in which critics identify a dialectic of subverted self-location—autofictional attempts at the remediation of her split identity between French, Arabic, and Amazigh languages. This paper proposes to read anew two novels in the tetralogy, Fantasia, an Algerian Cavalcade and So Vast the Prison, by analyzing the implications of their reliance on a distinct narrative strategy to tell their stories: the unmotivated and unexplained, abrupt collision of distant historical planes. In both novels, Djebar subjects historical time to great compression and places side by side episodes of the same history set more than one hundred years apart, linking the situation of Algeria after the independence to the scene of colonial conquest by the French. Her aim is to make emerge repressed points of friction about the history of language politics in Algeria: how, to put it in Djebar’s own words, “the tongue of the murderers of her great uncles” would be the instrument of her own intellectual and gendered liberation. Yet, beyond the ideological contradiction—oppression turned emancipation—and the historical tautology—French colonialism explains the appropriation of the French language by Algerians—at no point does Djebar attempt to show how the conquest might have durably structured the linguistic situation of Algeria. This paper argues, first, that the unexplained gaps in both narratives constitute a distinct formal strategy on the part of Djebar. Their recurrence produces a silence at the core of her texts, which I term a poetics of historical discontiguity, and analyze as a mode of representation for the layers of mediation which tie the scene of conquest to the scene of writing. Second, the paper probes the historical unconscious of Djebar’s novels, by showing how one important intertext, Hamdan Khodja’s The Mirror—the first Algerian anticolonial pamphlet published in Paris in 1833—constitutes the filigree linking these textual silences together. In his counter-history of the Algerian nation, Khodja shows how colonial rule asserted itself from the outset through a project of linguistic engineering, and thus brings into view the historical processes only operative in the blanks of Djebar’s novels—how the imposition of her own language of writing, French, was predicated on the destruction of Ottoman Algiers and the erasure of its language, Arabic.

This paper explores the formulations and sociopolitical implications of the concept of “al-aṣlaniyya” or “indigeneity” in 20th century Basra, Iraq. In the context of the collapse of Ottoman rule, the 1920 British mandate and American imperial presence, and subsequent arrival of British and American missionaries in Iraq, I navigate iterations of indigeneity in Basra as a mode of embodied knowledge production beyond the nativist genealogical logic of blood and soil and reactionary mainstream nationalism. By engaging the experimental aesthetics of content and form of Mortaḍā Gzār’s Hāthā al-Nahru Ya‘rifu Ismī (The River Knows My Name) (2023), I argue that the Arabic novel conceptualizes al-aṣlaniyya as an alternative historiographic method that rewrites Basra’s history through embodied entanglements between human and nonhuman bodies. Indigeneity, as imagined in the narrative prose of an Irāqī queer diasporic writer, is racialized and gendered structure, and a relational way of life which reveals the irreconcilable tension between local communities and colonial power. I locate moments of indigenous life-making by attending to the formal novel structure, cartographic journey of the protagonist through the landscapes and waterscapes of the Mesopotamian marshes, and memorial and mythmaking practices in Southern Iraq. The novel ultimately produces an archive of embodied memory. It rewrites the colonial and extractive history of Basra from the embodied experience of indigenous encounters between human and ecology. By drawing on the frameworks of Hisham Aïdi’s problematization of “indigeneity,” Naveeda Khan’s “chars,” or sandbars, and Anna Tsing’s “conditions of precarity,” I demonstrate how indigeneity is a self-reflexive construct which both problematizes colonial racial discourse in tandem with global capitalism. Yet, it is also at risk of being weaponized as an essentialist orientalist tool that dichotomizes native and colonist, desert and sea, and history and myth, which are co-opted by nationalist claims to an authentic “Arab” identity and narrative of modern progress in Iraq. Indigeneity, then, renders a decolonial historiography that rethinks categories of race, gender, and religion through bodies.

The present politics of suspicion surrounding Arabs and Muslims as the Palestinians in Gaza continue to struggle with the occupation is an extension of a discourse that started well before 9/11, but was galvanized by its events. Reflecting on what is currently happening in Palestine and the lack of engagement in the world literary debate with Arab women writers calls for a more nuanced engagement with contemporary Arab and Arab American literature. Reconfiguring contemporary Arab women’s writing as powerful locations of creative and political expression, my paper examines Sahar Khalifeh’s The Inheritance (first published in 1997) and Susan Abulhawa’s Against the Loveless World (2019) to show not only how long the Palestinian occupation has been rooted in cultural memory, but also how Arab writers writing in Arabic from the homeland like Khaliefeh imagine Palestine and life under the occupation in comparison with Arab American writers like Abulhawa. Following in the footsteps of Olivia Harrison in Transcolonial Magrhib: Imagining Palestine in the Era of Decolonization (2015), my paper argues that Palestine continues to be deployed as the figure of the colonial for both Arab and Arab American writers. I wish to expand on Harrison’s argument and make a distinction between the various ways Palestine is imagined and the construction of the Palestinian metaphor in the Arab world and in diasporic contexts. I also draw on the work of the Black feminist intellectual Audre Lorde in Sister/Outsider:Essays and Speeches (1984) and what she articulates as “moving toward coalition and effective action” (128). My goal is to not only draw out generative links between Arab women writers in the homeland and in diaspora, but also highlight the differentiation that continues to be lacking in the relatively small body of literary scholarship produced on Arab and Arab American women writers thus far. Beyond post-9/11 racism, I also examine the contestations within the Arab world at large exploring its place within the modern world-system and the implications of Arab politics and social upheavals for literature, especially literature by women which continues to be a gap in the current world literary debate. While writers like Abulhawa and Khalifeh among others, write from vastly different geographical and temporal locations, their works share more similarities than differences, emphasizing “solidarity” as part of retelling the, often neglected, narratives of Arab women.

This research examines how the 9/11 generation in Canada, a cohort comprising of Muslim and/or Arab individuals who came of age during the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks (e.g., the War on Terror, heightened Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism) interpret the testimonies of American war resisters from the 2003-2011 US-Iraq War. Specifically, through qualitative semi-structured interviews with members of the 9/11 generation in Canada, this study explores how this generation imagines solidarity and co-resistance with American war resisters, that is former soldiers who participated in the Iraq war and developed a resistance against it, an understanding based on this generation’s own experiences of the enduring post-9/11 era. In doing so, this study raises pivotal questions about lived experiences, refusal, forgiveness, and the limits of solidarity and allyship, with a particular focus on its manifestation between these two distinct communities. Specifically, this research provides valuable insights into how a generation profoundly influenced by the everlasting post-9/11 landscape imagines solidarity and co-resistance with individuals who at one point perpetuated the challenges and racism faced by the 9/11 generation, but now find themselves advocating against the same oppressive forces. Moreover, this study holds broader implications, particularly in the context of the ongoing atrocities in Palestine. Specifically, it underscores the urgent need to refocus discussions on the enduring impacts of post-9/11’s heightened Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, evident in the current public portrayal of Palestinians, and the escalating acts of discrimination and violence against the Muslim and Arab community. Through re-centering these discussions, this research contributes important insights on how these facets of racism persist, how Muslim and/or Arab individuals challenge these facets, and the ways in various actors within our society, such as potential allies like American war resisters, can actively address and support those victimized by such acts. Lastly, this research’s exploration of how the 9/11 generation envisions movements of solidarity and co-resistance with American war resisters is more crucial than ever. This importance presents itself through the widespread acts of support occurring globally for the Palestinian cause, and by extension the Muslim and/or Arab community who once again are subjected to heightened Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism reminiscent of the immediate post-9/11 era.