As in the wake of other major catastrophes, the ongoing mass killing and destruction in Gaza is calling into question literature’s self-conception, public role, and structural limits. While it is inscribed in the longue durée of occupation and settler colonialism, the terrible violence that we have witnessed on and after October 7 has brought back to the fore the question of literature’s ethical and political value. Taking inspiration from works that emphasize the entanglements between a text’s aesthetic properties and its politics, such as Gil Hochberg’s In Spite of Partition (2007), Laila El-Haddad and Refaat Alareer’s Gaza Unsilenced (2015), and Anna Bernard’s Decolonizing Literature (2023), this panel explores how contemporary literature can elicit a critical reflection on the webs of narratives that sustain violence and oppression.
The panel is structured into four 12-minutes presentations, followed by a 15-minutes discussion (and 10-12 for introductions and transitions). The presentations concentrate on contemporary Palestinian and Palestinian-American poetry and intersect close readings with different strands of literary theory.
Cindy Juyoung Ok will begin by focusing on Fady Joudah’s poetry collection [...], written from October to December 2023 as swaths of his family members were killed in Gaza. Ok’s presentation will discuss the tension between the fact that Palestinian poets have been historically targeted and murdered because of their power and the reality that most poetry is unable to interrupt the ongoing violence and dispossession. The paper will offer close readings of Joudah’s poems and engage with research in the public humanities to question the role of poetry in the face of ongoing violence.
Drawing on the work of Jacques Rancière, Stefano Bellin will explore how poetry can reconfigure the West’s “distribution of the sensible” by challenging dominant narratives about Palestine and the systematic dehumanization of Palestinians. Bellin will focus on Mohammed El-Kurd’s collection of poetry Rifqa (2021) and analyze three concepts: exile, resistance, and the sayable/unsayable.
Christian Wessels’s presentation will address “the problem of naming” by engaging with Fady Joudah’s poems, literary theory, and sociolinguistics. In doing so, Wessel will probe the limits and possibilities of language in the face of extreme violence.
Finally, Ibrahim Badshah will approach translation as a reaction to ongoing violence. His paper will focus on Rafaat Alareer’s poem “If I must Die” and its translation into more than 50 languages following his murder by Israeli forces to discuss how translation can become both the medium and method of resistance. Drawing comparisons between Aleer’s work and postcolonial literature, Badashah will discuss the activist potential of translation, theorizing what he calls “resistance translation”.
Each presentation thematizes a relevant literary problem—how to write while being the target of a genocidal campaign, the sayable and the unsayable, the problem of naming, and translation as a form of resistance—and offers case studies that link theoretical questions with the conflict in Gaza (and Palestine in general). In doing so, the panel will prompt a discussion about how we can write, read, or think about disaster when by its very nature it defies language, shakes aesthetic schemata, and shatters meaning. While the panel focuses on literature and the war in Gaza, the literary issues addressed in the four papers transcend the context of Palestine and will be of interest to scholars working on the ethical-political role of contemporary literature and literary criticism.
The panel incorporates a diversity of voices by including scholars from five different institutions and geographical locations, at different career stages, and approaching Palestinian poetry from various disciplinary angles. Building on the different positionalities and cultural backgrounds of the panelists, we aim to promote an open and respectful conversation on a difficult subject such as literature and the ongoing violence in Palestine/Israel. Indeed, our conversation stems from the belief that we should not only build our academic community on the pillars of diversity and inclusion, but also that we should try to model in our scholarship and public discussions the spaces of mutual recognition and free exchange of ideas that we hope to see in the world outside academia.