The Specters of Nation and Narration
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Date
2017-05-01
Authors
Abusamra, Sanaa
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Abstract
Since 1948, the Israeli occupation has strived to push Palestinians and Palestine to the
sphere of absence to legitimize their presence and claim over Palestine. The
Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a conflict of narratives over a nation (Palestine),
revealing that the nation is discursively constructed and power structures are created
and controlled through discourse. Thus, in response to the Zionist discourse that
justifies and legitimizes the presence (establishment) of Israel and obliterates and
negates the Palestinians and Palestine, many Palestinian authors such as Ghassan
Kanafani, Samih al-Qasim, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Fadwa Touqan, Sahar Khalifeh,
Mahmoud Darwish, among many others, orchestrated their literary works with themes
of exile, psychological trauma, nostalgia and return. In other words, they have put
their pens at the service of the nation so as to reclaim the absent paradise (Palestine).
In this paper, I will explain the ghostliness of the self, land and language in Mahmoud
Darwish’s self-eulogy, Absent Presence (2006/2010), drawing on Derrida’s Specters
of Marx (1993/1994) and Barthes’ post-structural seminal (ghostly) text, “The Death
of The Author” (1967).
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Research Subject Categories::HUMANITIES and RELIGION::Languages and linguistics::Other languages::Arabic language , absence , death , ghosts , presence , remembrance , specters , textuality