Introduction -- Nostalgic Memory and Palestinian Identification -- Traveling Theory: On the Balconies of Our Houses in Exile -- Exilic Narrativity: Audiovisual Storytelling and Memory -- The Performance of Catastrophe and Palestinian Identity -- Mankoub: Narrative Fragments of an Ongoing Catastrophe -- Afterword: Telling Memories in a Time of Catastrophe
Summary
This book explores with the cultural memory of al-Nakba (the Catastrophe, 1948) and its significance for modern Palestinian imagination. This book addresses central concepts to debates over Palestinian identity such as nostalgia and trauma, notions of home and forced travel, identity as representationally performative, and post-memory and geopolitical continuity of loss of place in the everyday. Through an integrated method of close narrative and discursive analysis of diverse literary texts, films and personal narratives, this study offers an analytical account of the meaning of exilic identity in situations of a catastrophic nature, as well as the ways in which aesthetics and politics intersect in contemporary Palestinian culture
