Abstract
Abstract The article reflects on how to embrace the unconventional, fragmented, scattered, transnational, exilic, and refugee elements of Palestinian Literature. Placing the refugees at the heart of the story of Palestinian literature raises serious questions about the compatibility of the national framework as the primary mode of analysis. The article explores the anatomy of Palestinian literature, including the wide array of sources, literary detective work, and expanded methodological toolbox needed to gather its fragments, and illustrates the potential of the digital sphere—drawing on the world of Digital Humanities—to house, express and visualize the data-fragments of Palestinian literature.
Highlights
The story of Palestinian literature resembles the story of its people
The imposition of the national literary model on a primarily exilic and diasporic literature has impacted the way we study, read, understand, and write about Palestinian literature
What if we place the refugee at the center of the story of Palestinian literature? What would the history of that literature look like if we were to follow the footsteps of Palestinian refugees and exiles? While Palestinian refugees have been extensively written about as subjects of humanitarian crises, rarely have they been acknowledged as important literary and cultural creators
Summary
The story of Palestinian literature resembles the story of its people. It is a story of an entire nation-in-exile: refugees, forced displacement, uprooting, fragmentation, statelessness, loss, trauma, tragedy, ruins, and silence. In addition to Palestinian refugees and exiles producing literature in other Arab countries, many of those countries have, at different points, taken up the Palestinian struggle as their own national cause, generating their own sets of associated literary productions with both positive and negative results. This production highlights the often fraught and ephemeral relationships between national literatures and refugees as literary creators with multiple geographies of literary dissemination. Literary scholars who had grown up in that camp have highlighted another error in Kanafānī’s story—the presence of the wall clock
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