Writing Returns: The Poetics of Return in Palestinian Literature
This project studies the diverse and transformative poetics of return in Palestinian literature. It applies critical and comparative methods on a varied corpus, including poetry and prose; Arabic, Hebrew, and English texts; texts written by men, women, and dual authors; texts written in various countries in the Middle East and texts written in the United States, ranging from the 1950s to early 2010s. Rather than homologizing the different voices appearing throughout the texts, the comparative and critical approach pays attention to critical differences – linguistic, territorial, historical, political, gendered, and more. It thus reveals gaps, dilemmas, inconsistencies, and transformations in the Palestinian articulations of return. As the project seeks to demonstrate, these features construct the return in Palestinian literature as a plastic figure that can express and form radical linguistic, social, and political possibilities. As such, the question of return may offer a prism that simultaneously connects and holds critical differences, not only among Palestinian literature but world literature in general.