The talk delves into the diverse and transformative poetics of return in Palestinian literature. Rooted in the 1948 Palestinian Nakba and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, return has long been a core issue in Palestinian politics, cultural production, and research. Since Israel persists in denying the return of the Palestinian refugees and continues to displace more Palestinians, and since Palestinian refugees experience different forms, conditions, and localities of exile, the question of return is as acute and complicated today as it was in 1948. Its acuteness and complexity, nonetheless, call for a nuanced understanding of the myriad ways in which Palestinians perceive and formulate return. To provide such understanding, the talk looks into different articulations of return in Palestinian literary texts. The literary approach allows exploring fundamental questions: What is a return? What can it be? What are its implications? As the talk demonstrates, the answer is radically open, as return unfolds as a plastic figure that can express radical and critically different linguistic, social, and political possibilities. As such, it argues, the question of return may offer a prism that simultaneously connects and holds critical differences, among Palestinian literature and culture and beyond.
Ido Fuchs is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at Tel Aviv University and a 2024/25 Associated EUME Doctoral Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien. In Spring 2025, he will join the Network for Environmental Humanities at Utrecht University as a Visiting Researcher. His research, examining different aspects of cultural production in Palestine/Israel, has been published in several peer-reviewed journals, including Theoretical Practice, Mafteakh, and Bezalel.
Loaay Wattad, a 2023-26 EUME Fellow at the Forum Transregionale Studien, is a literary scholar and critic with a focus on the sociology of Palestinian and Israeli children’s literature. Based at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, his dissertation, titled Minor Literature for Minor Readers, presents a comparative analysis of Palestinian children’s literature. Beyond his academic pursuits, Loaay actively contributes to the Maktoob translators’ circle, dedicated to translating literary works from Arabic to Hebrew. Furthermore, he serves as the editor-in-chief of the Hkaya journal, specializing in Arabic children’s literature.
Pleaser register in advance via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.
