Abstract
This essay explores the possibility that Anton Shammas’s novel Arabesques (1986) tentatively gestures towards what might be described as a “One-State” aesthetic for Israel–Palestine. It traces the novel’s complex intersections with the postcolonial, in order to show that Arabesques problematizes any straightforward investment in Palestinian cultural nationalism. Moore-Gilbert highlights the novel’s consistent unsettling of generic boundaries and the realism that it plays with and subverts, as well as its destabilization of dominant understandings of identity. In this regard, Shammas’s choice to write in Hebrew, the language of the “oppressor”, is connected to the novel’s apparent movement towards a “common culture” and indeed language for the region.
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