Rooted Movements: Radical Analytics and the Palestinian Poetics of Space

Amanda Batarseh
Literature
UC San Diego

Since the 1948 Nakba, the ongoing fragmentation and dislocation of Palestinian space has shaped Palestinian literary analysis. Criticism that centers Palestinian deracination, however, also risks re-inscribing the settler colonial logic of elimination. Ongoing Palestinian exile—which troubles definitional boundaries—further complicates Palestinian literary analysis. How do we approach this genre? With what tools? In which geographies? In what languages? In “Rooted Movements,” I contend that Indigenous epistemology—embedded within the Palestinian poetics of space—offers a decolonial method capable of resolving the apparent incongruities of Palestinian national literature. This “radical” analytic, which draws upon the dual connotations of the word—rootedness and revolutionary movement—surfaces an ongoing process of place-making that transcends the precision of physical location (and attendant colonial constructions of place and spatial belonging) to encompass relationships with, movements through, extensions from, and rootedness in the land. Literary analysis that bridges the geographic, linguistic, and generic segregation of Palestinian cultural production discloses its rhizomatic interconnections and how the decolonization of literary analysis is intimately bound to decolonization of our physical geographies. Palestinian literature poses alternate horizons of political and creative possibility for both.

Image credit: Muhammad ElMady @elmahdyart, Arabic Topography Tree.