Re-narrating the Palestinian Nakba in the changing scenes of postcolonial theory: a study of selected contemporary Palestinian fiction

This thesis explores the fiction of the Nakba, chiefly through analyzing four contemporary Palestinian novels. By bringing the Nakba centre stage, as a historical moment of rupture, my analysis seeks to demystify Palestine’s enmeshed colonial and postcolonial histories and capture the Palestinians’ sense of their displaced experience. My critical approach to the novels in question, which relies on and aims to extend the remit of postcolonial studies, responds to the history of silencing and denial of the Palestinian narratives of trauma and dispossession, compellingly present in my selected novels. This thesis assumes that the Nakba, as a major colonial trauma, is underrepresented in postcolonial studies. By critically engaging with postcolonial theory and critical studies in the field, my discussion suggests that, despite its limitations, postcolonial criticism has revealed an expanding range of responses to issues of trauma, nostalgia, memory, and displacement. Thus, it still provides the enabling tool and critical edge for reading and analyzing the fiction of the Nakba. In one of its main claims, my thesis contends that by exploring and inscribing the poetics of the Palestinian traumatic experience as well as its representational politics surfacing in my selected works, the Nakba is rendered from the periphery of postcolonial studies to the centre of its attention. My analysis proposes that, by moving across boundaries of novelistic genres, the novels of the Nakba engage in a poetics of resistance. Equally, they put forward a narrative of reclamation, one in which the concept of emancipation begins with the defence of history and memory. This study reveals that these texts encompass the aesthetics and poetics of nostalgia, narratives of becoming and magic realism, among other themes and novelistic forms. It also demonstrates how through these novelistic strategies the novels weave together the nation’s memory, history and culture to respond to the settler-colonial structures of oppression and erasure. Taking the selected novels as a template for the current emerging Nakba fiction, I contend that they mediate a new aesthetic and political consciousness. My thesis concludes that the postcolonial discourse of the Nakba is multiple, aiming to pursue the liberation of Palestinian lands, bodies, history and culture