The Palestinian Novel After the Era of Mass Revolt
The history of the Palestinian novel cannot be separated from the broader political context of the struggle for liberation. As the emancipatory horizon in Palestine has diminished since the early 1980s, literature has shared in the sense of defeat.
In the global context of the ongoing “war on terror,” Palestinians are no longer seen as a decolonizing people with national rights but as a group of terrorists and ticking bombs. (Makbula Nassar / Wikimedia Commons)
Since the Nakba of 1948, the Palestinian novel has been at the forefront of articulating the experience of national dispossession as well as emancipatory horizons in the Arab world. It has charted the changing relations between literary form and collective action, between aesthetics and politics.
It was in 1948 that Palestinians lost their homeland and became refugees scattered in Arab countries and beyond. The Nakba thus marks a process of historical dispossession and defeat in which a settler colonial movement pushed out a people, expropriated their land, and replaced them with settler labor. It took Palestinians over a decade to reorganize and rearticulate their political movements: first under Arab nationalism (often neglected as a period of study) and then, after 1967, within a new Palestinian nationalism.
The period of 1967 to 1982 constitutes the rise and fall of post-’48 Palestinian nationalism, both of Arab-wide popular revolutionary possibility and secular, armed guerrilla struggle. After the defeat of Beirut by Israel in 1982, a generalized political decline set in. This was ruptured by the first intifada in 1987 — the last significant act of mass popular mobilization — which was in turn liquidated by Israel and exploited by the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Oslo.
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