Beyond Magical Realism: Situating Palestinian Liberation within Indigenous Futurisms
I approach magical realism as a literary mode used in settler-colonial and post-colonial contexts to resist the destruction of the colonized people’s spaces. My research investigates how Palestinian magical realism, with its strands of surrealism, Gothicism, science fiction, and fantasy, resists the ongoing Nakba. I am interested in figures and tropes such as ghosts, mythical creatures, dreams, metamorphosis, resurrection, animism, and the manipulation of time. During my EUME Fellowship, I will work on a book manuscript based on my dissertation, Oh Whale, Do Not Swallow Our Moon!’: How Manifestations of Magical Realism Reflect and Challenge Distorted Palestinian Spaces in Literature. I will expand my research by including additional frameworks, such as (magical) Marxism, indigenous futurisms, and climate fiction. This perhaps strengthens the central premise of magical realism’s revolutionary potential and its possible utilization towards imagining and materializing liberated futures against settler-colonialism and after it. While building on the premise of magical realism as a postcolonial investigative tool in literature, I want to address questions such as: Do Palestinian, indigenous, and black ghosts play the same roles? How does climate fiction parallel Palestinian ‘eco-surrealism’? Can magical realism inspire a renewed Marxist reading of settler-colonialism? How can liberated futures emerge from magical-realistic contexts?