Al-Aqsa Flood as Pedagogical Rupture: Teaching Palestinian Diaspora Literature in the Wake of the Flood

• In Event: Palestine Solidarity and Resistances to Empire: Diasporic Cultural Production as Decolonial Praxis

Abstract

Al-Aqsa Flood has largely been theorized as a “moment of rupture” (editors of the New York War Crimes 2024) tearing apart a pre-October 7th status quo (Palestinian Youth Movement 2024) both as a decolonial praxis of return, rupturing the partition framework fragmenting Palestinian land and people (Baconi 2023), and as a “psychological and epistemological rupture,” a paradigm shift rupturing the illusion of the all-powerful zionist entity and a totalizing American empire (Mercan 2023; Gerges 2014). In this paper, I argue that this psychological and epistemological rupture has made its way to the empire, specifically to the classroom, whether it be in the multiethnic American literature classroom, or the Palestinian diaspora literature classroom, exposing social and political contradictions like never before. I read the decolonial possibilities that arise from the classroom during this historical conjuncture alongside theories of recognition and rupture (Sankar 2019; Fanon 1961; Hammad 2024) in order to situate this rupture as transforming how students in the empire view their positionalities and responsibilities, or, forming critical consciousness (Freire 1968). I analyze the interplay between my pedagogical strategies (influenced by bell hooks, Paulo Freire, and Basim Sarhan) and my students’ aversion to centering an “American” identity in my multiethnic American literature course through student writing and class discussions on issues like borders, settler-colonialism, abolition, the student movement, and divestment. Similarly, I analyze the interplay between my pedagogical strategies in my Palestinian diaspora literature course and class discussions and student writings on the term “American” when naming Palestinian diaspora in Turtle Island, resisting fragmentation by connecting diaspora to homeland, and using literature (whether poetry, comics, or the novel) as a vessel in diaspora to understand, imagine, and enact a praxis of resistance and return that does not depend on an international law framework. I will focus more on the second course in situating the unique possibilities diaspora literature opens up to students in this rupture. In both courses, I employ pedagogical tactics in which students practice agency, starting us off with daily news recaps connecting the classroom to the world, where it has become clear that Al-Aqsa Flood has become their rupture. I witness this rupture in their creative projects as well, such as tributes to martyrs of empire in Turtle Island or comics imagining a return to Palestine. In both courses, what used to feel like exercises in imagining liberation now feel like something beyond– these futures are practical & tangible to them now, and I attribute this to the rupture of Al-Aqsa Flood. I also situate the pedagogical rupture for me, comparing teaching Palestine pre and post Al-Aqsa Flood’s rupture, reflecting on strategies that seem to have different meanings and effects now. While diaspora literature helps enact a future of return for all Palestinians, students in the empire studying it during this rupture truly begin to see themselves as part of this work, committing to a politic of joint struggle through critical consciousness of their responsibilities to halt genocide and make occupation untenable in the empire (Jordan 1982; Magloire 2024).

Author

• Ruba Akkad, Austin College