Palestine, the Shatat, and the American Literary Imagination (HYBRID)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable session considers the productive disruptions and disruptive productions of contemporary Palestinian literature as a worldly enterprise considered in the American context. To situate Palestinian literature in the world, the panel begins with the premise that the shatat helps to name the constitutive threads linking longstanding attachments to land; ongoing histories of dispossession; juridical and affective regimes of refugeehood and return; and variegated contexts for place-making, community-building, and the cultivation of political imagination. Panelists probe the ways the shatat as a historical condition and set of political, aesthetic, and geographic orientations shadows and saturates the American imagining and positioning of Palestinian literature writ large, from its intellectual framing to the institutional infrastructures that hold space for its circulation.

Panelists enter the problem-space of these concerns through a range of questions, archives and modes of argumentation. Benjamin Schreier plumbs the sedimented institutional contexts—academic, US political-cultural, and neo-imperial—in which a not-quite coherent Palestinian American literary study labors for legibility in Arab American and Ethnic literary fields. Amanda Batarseh seeks to disrupt the boundaries between “Palestinian literature” and “Palestinian-American literature” through a “radical” reading practice that centers both rootedness and revolutionary or disruptive movement–unsettling, through her readings of Hussein Barghouti’s Blue Light and Randa Jarrar’s A Map of Home, national literature’s relationship to the nation-state. Keith Feldman thinks alongside the innovative aesthetic practices of several Palestinian poets in the U.S.—George Abraham and Zeina Alsous—whose works not only surface an imagined geography of the shatat intimately entangled with contemporary US imperial culture, but do so through embodied affinities to abolitionist and decolonial histories and visions. Rana Sharif turns to the 2020 Palestine Writes Literature Festival to consider what it means to articulate a Palestinian literary technomediated poetics of embodied experience, and whether such poetics might reveal intimacies of Palestinian sociality unrestricted by the limits of state sovereignty and borders; in doing so, Sharif tarries with works that raise the possible displacement of location as essential to the narration of Palestinian literary traditions. Danielle Haque analyzes how narratives of Israel and Palestine shape American attitudes toward its own settler colonial past and present, particularly in relation to the mythologies of the American West; Palestinian American writers invert the frontier logic that often frames Palestinian resistance as threat through an ecocritical lens, exposing the environmental violence of occupation and offering alternative visions of land, belonging, and decolonial futures.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Benjamin Schreier, Penn State University

Panelists

• Benjamin Schreier, Penn State University

• Keith Feldman, University of California-Berkeley

• Rana A. Sharif, University of California-Berkeley

• Danielle Haque

Virtual Accommodation Panelist

• Amanda Batarseh, University of California-San Diego

Biographical Information

Amanda Batarseh is an Assistant Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at the University of California, San Diego. She received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from UC Davis and was a UC Chancellor's Postdoctoral Fellow at UC Riverside in the Department of Languages and Literature. Her forthcoming book project, tentatively titled Rooted Movements: The Radical Poetics of Palestinian Space, proposes a decolonial literary analysis that re-centers Palestinian modes of place-making as both a narrative tradition and analytical lens. Her recent publications include “Centering Place in Tawfiq Canaan’s Literary Cartography” (Journal of Palestine Studies, 2023) and “Raja Shehadeh's ‘Cartography of Refusal’: The Enduring Land Narrative Practice of Palestinian Walks” (Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2021).

Keith P. Feldman is an associate professor of Ethnic Studies at UC Berkeley. His research program is dedicated to illuminating the intricate connections between race, culture, knowledge, and state power, with a particular focus on varied entanglements between the United States and West Asia. Feldman's first book, A Shadow over Palestine: The Imperial Life of Race in America (2015), provides a critical cultural analysis of the conjunction between the post-civil rights United States and Israel’s post-1967 occupation of Palestinian lands. A Shadow over Palestine received the 2017 Best Book in Humanities and Cultural Studies (Literary Studies) from the Association for Asian American Studies and was a Finalist for the American Studies Association’s 2016 Lora Romero First Book Publication prize. He has published over two dozen scholarly articles, essays, and book chapters, including, most recently, “Carceral Entanglement in the Work of Leila Abdelrazaq” (Qui Parle), “You (Shall Have the Body: Patterns of Life in the Shadow of Guantánamo” (The Comparatist), and “Incommensurability, Inextricability, Entanglement: Stuart Hall and the Question of Palestine” (Diaspora and Literary Studies). He is the co-editor of #identity: Hashtagging Race, Gender, Sexuality, and Nation (2019). Feldman’s current projects include “Patterns of Life: Race, Aesthetics and the Proximate Archives of Global War,” a book-length study of the ways contemporary SWANA diasporic expressive cultures innovate, consolidate, and contest race- and space-making processes in the long war on terror. What aesthetic, political, and ethical sensibilities do these practices hone, and to what effect? How might such work shift what Sylvia Wynter calls our “universe of moral obligation?” To answer these questions, the project leverages the insights of diasporic aesthetics to consider matters of proximity and relationality—that war might not always be as distant as it seems, nor its histories as distinct. Feldman is also at work on a series of essays on race, relationality, and the crossroads of diaspora. He has served as the elected secretary of the Arab American Studies Association and on the International Committee of the ASA.

Rana A. Sharif (she/her/هي) is the UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Ethnic Studies. She is also an independent research fellow with the Digital Democracies Institute at Simon Fraser University and a Race and Digital Justice Fellow. Her research is located at the intersection of the humanities and emerging technologies, including new and digital media. In her work she explores narratology in the digital age. Her current book project advances a theory of Palestinian digital poetics illustrating how technomediated media invite a decolonial feminist literary reading practice. This practice in reading is grounded in indigenous survivance, refusal, and narration through the mode and medium of the digitally enabled and communal archives. In addition to her academic work, she is a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective and co-hosts and produces shows and podcasts as part of Pacifica Radio’s SWANA Region Radio/Radio Intifada.

Danielle Haque is a scholar of Arab American Studies, Muslim American Studies, and the Environmental Humanities, whose research examines the intersections of race, religion, and empire in literature and culture. She is the author of Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (Syracuse University Press, 2019), which explores how Arab American and transnational SWANA cultural producers challenge secularist assumptions in U.S. and European discourse. Her scholarship has appeared in leading journals, including American Literature, MELUS, American Quarterly Studies, Mashriq & Mahjar, and Research in Diversity and Youth Literature. Haque has contributed numerous chapters to edited collections, including Sajjilu SWANA: A Reader in Arab American Studies, Buffalo Bill Centennial Anthology, A Companion to the Multi-Ethnic Literatures of the United States, and Near East to Far West: Fantasies of French and American Colonialism. She has chapters forthcoming in the Handbook of Research on Diversity in Children's and Young Adult Literature, The Companion to Arab American Literature, Constructing the Other: Empathy and the Ethics of Imagining Difference in Literature, and Mapping a Transnational Toni Morrison: Perspectives from the Arab World. Beyond her research, Haque serves as the President-Elect of the Arab American Studies Association and is an active leader in faculty governance as Vice President of the MNSU Faculty Association.

Benjamin Schreier is Mitrani Family Professor of English and Jewish Studies at Penn State University. His books include The Rise and Fall of Jewish American Literature: Ethnic Studies and the Challenge of Identity (Penn 2020), The Impossible Jew: Identity and the Reconstruction of Jewish American Literary History (NYU 2015), and The Power of Negative Thinking: Cynicism and the History of Modern American Literature (Virginia 2009). He’s currently at work on two projects: one on Palestinian American literature in the context of the development of Arab American studies with the working title “Palestinianism,” and another on Zionism and the institutional and cultural politics of the Jewish Studies field. He has served as editor of the journal Studies in American Jewish Literature since 2012.