Country of Words : A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature

Abstract

Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature is a digital-born project that seeks to retrace and remap the global story of Palestinian literature in the twentieth century, starting from the Arab world, and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America.Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a networked meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of a literature-in-motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, open-ended literary history. The story of Palestinian literature resembles the story of its people: an entire nation-in-exile scattered and fragmented across countries and continents. However, the logic of the nation-state still looms large over literary studies despite an unprecedented number of the world's population living as refugees, exiles, or stateless people. As a case study, Palestinian literary history allows us the possibility to "read together" national and exilic, encouraging a transnational comparative perspective. It also gives us the opportunity to think of new ways to write nonlinear nonconventional literary histories of displacement and movement, exposing new constellations, networks, trajectories, relationships, and collaborations; working across multiple literary geographies, and revealing just how multilayered these literary histories can be.