Literature Program and Middle Eastern Studies Program Present

Nothing to Lose but Our Tents: Camp, Revolution, Novel

Revolution and narrative are entangled forms.  Both are understood as being about the forward progressive movement of time, as organized around totalizing events and central protagonists.  The Palestinian Revolution was at once a territorial and narrational struggle.  And these struggles came together in what was the Revolution’s principal dilemma—the camp.  How one might form a historical subject of movement from the encamped refugees became itself a problem of narrative. If revolution and narrative are both about the movement of time, and camps are essentially devices for the immobilization of time, then how does one stage and write a revolution from the camp? The challenge required nothing less than the transformation of the camps into the means of their own undoing.  This talk examines three novels of the revolutionary period to show that Palestinian revolutionary realism both heeded the insurrectionary call but also undermined it.  Reading these novels along this defining tension, I argue, points us to political roads not taken, to ways of thinking about revolution itself differently.Nasser Abourahme is a faculty fellow at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University, where he works between political and urban geography, colonial studies, and political theory. 

---

For more information, call 845-758-6822, or e-mail [email protected].

Time: 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4

Location: Bertelsmann Campus Center, Weis Cinema

Subscribe: Save this Event: Subscribe / .ics File