SEM Transculturalismes : Jumana Bayeh (Macquarie University, Sydney), « The Palestinian Rebel in Fiction »

This paper focuses on the figure of the Palestinian rebel in three texts published since the Second Intifada (2000-2005). The Intifada highlighted to Palestinians that statehood had not only been made more difficult to achieve since the 1993 Oslo Accords, but also that liberation from Israeli occupation must precede state-building. This represents a reversal to what had been widely assumed, and perhaps still erroneously perceived by many, that statehood and liberation are coeval. In The Parisian by Isabella Hamad, A Rebel in Gaza by Asmaa al-Ghoul and Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, rebel characters are deployed to emphasise that liberation is central to and a necessary precursor of the achievement of state-based independence. 

Jumana Bayeh is Senior Lecturer at Macquarie University, Australia. She is the author of The Literature of the Lebanese Diaspora: Representations of Place and Transnational Identity (2015), has co-edited a volume on Arabs in Australia, and has published on Arab diaspora fiction, the relationship between diaspora and world literature and the impact of diaspora on democracy. She is currently working on two projects – one that examines the Arab diaspora novel from Australia, North America and the UK and another collaborative work on rioting and the literary archive. In 2022, is a fellow at the Collegium de Lyon concentrating on the former of these two projects.