Palestinian American Literature and its Others
Description
Palestinian American literature emerges within the shifting terrain of Arab American studies, which coalesced in the 1970s–1980s through post–civil rights identity movements and Cold War/post–Cold War reorientations of imperial power. Palestinian identity, in particular, is inseparable from the long history of US support for Israel and the special status Jewish identity holds in US cultural politics, a field shaped by antagonisms structuring Arab American cultural production: US imperial entanglements in the SWANA region, the political exceptionality of Palestine in US discourse, and the differential racialization of Arab and Jewish identities through state policy, securitization regimes, and cultural capital.
While often placed within the larger category of Palestinian national literature, Palestinian American literature exceeds that rubric’s historical, institutional, political, and intellectual frames. Here, “Palestinian” and “American” are not fixed or mutually transparent descriptors but contested sites that require methodological traffic across disciplines. The field aligns with Black Studies, Indigenous Studies, Asian American Studies, Queer Studies, and Disability Studies, not as simple analogues in a comparative model, but as co-constitutive interlocutors in theorizing empire, racial capitalism, and settler colonialism. Its interdisciplinarity is structural, arising from transnational circuits of militarism, migration, and cultural production that exceed the sovereign frame of the US nation-state.
This seminar approaches Palestinian American literature as a site of knowledge production whose theoretical work reframes the archive of US ethnic and postcolonial literatures through the optic of Palestine. It asks how the field destabilizes the liberal multiculturalist containment of Arab American identity, intervenes in the racial and geopolitical ordering of the university, and reorients disciplinary boundaries. Attending to the longue durée of Arab American history, the seminar positions Palestinian American literary studies not as a subfield to be “included” but as a critical apparatus for apprehending the entanglement of cultural form, state violence, and political imagination under ongoing empire.
We invite papers that examine the political, academic, and cultural discourses in which Palestinian American literature participates. In relation to what other social projects and historical inquiries does it become visible? In what intersections with other identity groups has Palestinian American identity emerged as a literarily and culturally significant formation? What scholarly and intellectual activities illuminate its epistemological foundations? This seminar seeks a multivalent, interdisciplinary, and transnational account of this emergent cultural field.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Summer is a first year PhD student at Syracuse University where she strives to locate and create discursive (counter-)communities capable of uncovering the links between language and power. Her interests lie in the intersections of postcolonial and speculative fiction, gender studies, and new materialism. Her focus is in Arab-American (specifically Palestinian and Jordanian) women’s diasporic literature and alternative modes of rhetorical intervention such as autotheory.
Speaker Bio
Dalal is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and educator pursuing an M.A. in English at Florida Atlantic University. Her work centers on post/de-colonial theory, cultural memory, and Palestinian American literature, exploring how haunting, liminality, and social death shape diasporic identity. In addition to her graduate studies, Dalal instructs College Writing 1, integrating cultural rhetorics and narrative approaches to foster student voice and critical engagement.
Speaker Bio
Suja Sawafta is a Palestinian-American writer and critic. She is Assistant Professor of Arabic Studies at the University of Miami. Her academic monograph, Abdulrahman Munif: Exile and Dissidence in the Making of the Arabic Novel is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press. She is the author Two Shores, One Sea: Longing for Palestine's Mediterranean (Bored Wolves, 2025). Her writing has appeared in The Baffler, Vogue Arabia, Ballast, The Boston Globe, Grazia Middle East, and elsewhere.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Amanda Batarseh is an Assistant Professor of Literature whose teaching and research focus on Palestinian literature, Arabic literature, Arab American and Arab diaspora literature, Indigenous studies, Mediterranean studies, and comparative literature.
Speaker Bio
Danielle Haque is a professor of English at MNSU, Mankato. She is the author of Interrogating Secularism: Race and Religion in Arab Transnational Art and Literature (SUP). Her writing appears in numerous journals, including American Quarterly, American Literature, MELUS, Journal of World Literature, and Mashriq & Mahjar. Her work can be read in edited collections such as Near East to Far West: Fantasies of French and American Colonialism and Sajjilu: A Reader in Arab American Studies.
Speaker Bio
Silvia Ammary has a Ph.D. in American Literature. She did her MA in American drama (the drama of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller) and her PhD in American poetry (the influence of Futurism on the poetry of e.e.Cummings). Ammary has published books on teaching writing, international education, and American literature. Ammary is currently teaching at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy, as an assistant professor of American Literature and writing.
Speaker Bio
Eman Ghanayem is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of San Diego. Her work examines questions of displacement, settlement, and belonging through a framework of interconnected settler colonialisms and comparative indigeneities.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Helen Makhdoumian is a Collaborative Humanities Postdoctoral Program fellow at Vanderbilt University. She is affiliated with the Department of English and co-convenes the Indigenous Studies seminar through the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. Previously, she has held postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Los Angeles and the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
Speaker Bio
Professor of Comparative Literature & Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). He is the author of Melancholy Acts: Defeat and Cultural Critique in the Arab World (Fordham UP, 2023) & Signifying Loss: Toward a Poetics of Narrative Mourning (Bucknell UP, 2011/paperback 2015), and the editor of The Making of the Tunisian Revolution: Contexts, Architects, Prospects & The Edinburgh Companion to the Arab Novel in English (Edinburgh UP, 2013).
Speaker Bio
Sreeparna Das is a first-year doctoral student in Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Cincinnati. Originally from India, she holds a BA in English and two MAs, in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies. Her research interests include diaspora, racial citizenship, and decolonial and transnational feminisms.