Helen Makhdoumian

“Afterwords” offers literary history, grounds arguments by addressing narratology, conceptualizes narrative figures across literary canons, and demonstrates how embedded narrative structures illuminate social and political history. To that end, “Afterwords” identifies late twentieth and twenty-first-century prose and poetry by American Indian, First Nations, Armenian, and Palestinian authors as the literary archives of Indigenous dispossession and removal. The latter category extends to the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1915 Aghed, and the 1948 Nakba. Specifically, “Afterwords” gives name to the narrative structure through which these authors depict the recursive experience of violence and displacement across time and place: nested memory work. Nested memory does not just mean content—or, the iterative quality of settler colonial violence, ethnic civil war, or sometimes both, in the texts under study. In also applying nested memory as a methodology, “Afterwords” reveals how these authors understand the perpetration of settler colonial violence, why they depict the knowledge that the displaced carry of these events’ aftermaths, and what they emphasize descendants of the dispossessed interpret from their inheritances. Ultimately, it produces intellectual intimacies regarding traditionally cordoned off regions: the Middle East and Indigenous North America.