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.