Nadia G. Yaqub

This study examines how Palestinians use imaginative texts to address their subjectivity vis-à-vis contemporary Palestinian politics and their socio-political position in the world. It is organized around three tropes—the wedding, the road, and home—that are laden with social meaning involving the creation and continuity of social structure; the construction of self; gender; history; politics; hierarchy; and relationship to place. This project explains the socio-cultural importance of each trope and the local and transnational contexts in which it is used, charts its use in narrative texts from the 1950s to the present, and describes how Palestinians are literarily and visually exploiting that history in the narratives they create today.