The (post) colonial politics and aesthetics of post-1993 Palestinian life writing

Abstract

At the crossroad of postcolonial, Palestinian, and life writing studies, this thesis investigates contemporary Palestinian autobiographical narratives, and addresses the politics and poetics of this burgeoning literature. This study is particularly significant considering the critical observations that Palestinian literary studies remain on the margins of postcolonial studies, and that life writing studies remain peripheral to literary scholarship. Through textual and contextual analysis of the autobiographical narratives of authors Mourid Barghouti, Ghada Karmi, Raja Shehadeh, Suad Amiry, Najla Said, and Sari Nusseibeh, the thesis endeavours to highlight the contours of the genre that increasingly flourished in the past three decades. The narratives are contextualised in the historical and political frameworks of the 1993 Oslo Accords, which resulted in a liminal interim juncture and engendered a complex and multilayered colonial paradigm. The thesis complicates the (post)coloniality of post-Oslo Palestine by looking into the multilayered structure that followed the Accords, which made the settler colonial, the anticolonial, and the postcolonial precariously coexist; a standpoint that challenges common understanding of the historical framework. Examining identity, aesthetic forms, and linguistic practices in the first three chapters, and then moving to the thematic concepts of spatial and temporal liminalities and precolonial nostalgia in the last chapters, the thesis attempts to present a wide-ranging, nuanced study that unveils the innovative and experimental nature of the genre through a thorough investigation of the thematic, formal, aesthetic, and linguistic topographies of the selected texts.

Date of Award	25 Jul 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Northumbria University
Supervisor	Katherine Baxter (Supervisor), Peter Hill (Supervisor) & Neil Sadler (Supervisor)