This session seeks to bring together a variety of new approaches to the study of Palestinian literature and culture through the employment of the concept of “code.” In reference to multilingualism and transnationalism (language as code), textual cryptography in adversarial political circumstances (narrative as code), and online Palestinian nationalism in today’s globalized world (digital code), the presentations proposed for this session aim to redefine how we critically approach Palestinian literature and culture. Rather than develop a line of criticism based upon the political notion of an un-rescinded historic injustice committed against the Palestinian people in 1948, these presentations variedly suggest that the critic needs to emphasize the cultural significance of the past seven decades in order to seriously consider the consequences of displacement on the production and consumption of literature as well as cultural production across borders, languages, and generations.

Addressing these developments, the participants of this session present different interpretations of the concept of “code” to address the proliferation of Palestinian culture in a variety of contexts across the globe rather than basing their analyses in notions of unification, origin, and monolingualism to accommodate national sentiments. The various geographical, cultural and social settings housing today’s Palestinians in the world have yielded multiple life-styles and value systems based upon widely different socio-economic conditions. Basing their different arguments on this ongoing diversification of Palestinian culture, the participants’ respective presentations enlist the concept of “code” in a variety of ways to analyze the fluctuations of Palestinian trajectories both locally and globally.

Dr. Makhoul’s presentation, “Crypts, Memory, and Identity in Palestinian Literature,”

seeks to investigate Palestinian authors’ employment of cryptic settings such as caves, caverns, and grottos to hide family secrets or keys to personal identities (and so forth) from Israeli authorities and even from Israeli readers. The presentation will focus on major works by Ghassan Kanafani, Emile Habiby, and Anton Shammas to show the various manifestations of secrecy and code with regard to Palestinian discourse and identity. Dr. Elbaz’s talk, “Codes of Recognition: Comparing Transnational Literatures,” will examine the ramifications of exilic experience on literary coherence. To address these, Dr. Elbaz raises several questions: what does it mean to write beyond the bounds of the institutionalized state? What are the affordances and constraints of a multilingual, transnational, and dispersed literary system within the greater world republic of letters? Thinking both within a variety of power dynamics, Dr. Elbaz wishes to examine what makes Palestinian literature “recognizable” as “world literature.”

Professor Schreier’s presentation, “Palestinian American Literature versus Palestinian Literature,” focuses specifically on the developing branch of Palestinian American literature. He makes the claim that its institutional and cultural emergence should be studied in the US contexts rather than in subordination to the national-territorial logic of conventional Palestinian literary studies or as part of the ethnic project which Arab American studies has largely identified itself with. Lastly, Dr. Ebileeni’s paper, “Digital Palestine and the National Imaginary,” proposes to examine how online connectivity, accessibility, and addressability as well as the recently-designed features of online articulation (vis-à-vis posting, sharing, commenting, reacting, and so forth) is generating a new form of displaced Palestinian subjectivity. The development of digital nationalism is based on this subjectivity which transcends notions of territoriality, cultural homogenization, and monolingualism and reveals an ongoing diversification of Palestinian culture and literature.