Writing Returns: Unsettling Borders and Resisting Fragmentation in the Work of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud
This article examines Palestinian resistance to Israel's violent border regime – which aims to dispossess, fragment, and segregate Palestinian communities – through a close reading of Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Sarah Ihmoud's lifewriting essay "Exiled at Home: Writing Return and the Palestinian Home" (2014). It shows how Shalhoub-Kevorkian and Ihmoud's method of writing stories of return unsettles geographic, kinship, genre, epistemic, and subjective borders, thereby contesting colonial violence and offering alternative modes of belonging in the very form of writing. Situating this argument within the authors' broader scholarship and activism, and against the backdrop of the recent persecution of Shalhoub-Kevorkian for her academic work, the article concludes that resisting colonial border regimes may also call for challenging the boundaries of academic practice itself.