Papers by Maurice Ebileeni
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2023
This article proposes to discuss how the recent turn to the futuristic in a selection of Palestin... more This article proposes to discuss how the recent turn to the futuristic in a selection of Palestinian science fiction works assumes a fatalistic tenor in that it expresses the inability and unwillingness of Palestinian imagination to move forward and confront the prospects of what seems to be inevitable epistemic erasure. The article brings together Larissa Sansour’s sci-fi short film trilogy — A Space Exodus (2008), Nation Estate (2013), and In the Future They Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) — and a selection of short stories from the recent sci-fi collection Palestine [+100] (2019) edited by Basma Ghalayini. The aim is to demonstrate how the suspension of temporal progression in Palestinian imaginings structures futuristic configurations of three more-or-less familiar Palestinian tropes: 1. the utopic call for liberating Palestine “from the river to the sea,” 2. the dystopic implications of the (conceptual and territorial) shrinking space of a vanishing nation, and 3. continuation in the aftermath of the Palestinian apocalypse. To imagine in the cataclysmic present moment, I argue, epistemically asserts the existence of Palestine and, consequently, wards off the prospects of nonbeing as the possibility of statehood is steadily dwindling.
The Markaz Review, 2022
Cet essai est extrait de Being There, Being Here : Palestinian Writings in the World (Syracuse Un... more Cet essai est extrait de Being There, Being Here : Palestinian Writings in the World (Syracuse University Press, 2022) et est publié ici par arrangement spécial. "Dédié à la mémoire de Shireen Abu Akleh, l'une des voix palestiniennes les plus pertinentes et importantes de ces derniers temps. Tuée le 11 mai 2022-une balle dans la tête, probablement par un gamin en uniforme à qui on a appris toute sa vie que c'était sa vocation."
The Markaz Review, 2022
This essay is excerpted from Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World (Syracuse... more This essay is excerpted from Being There, Being Here: Palestinian Writings in the World (Syracuse University Press, 2022) and is published here by special arrangement. "Dedicated to the memory of Shireen Abu Akleh, one of the most relevant and important Palestinian voices of late. Killed on 11 May 2022-shot in the head, probably by some kid in a uniform who's been taught his entire life that this is his calling."
Mondoweiss, 2021
A recent debate over the term “settler colonialism” in Haaretz seeks to raise doubts over the app... more A recent debate over the term “settler colonialism” in Haaretz seeks to raise doubts over the appropriateness of using it to describe Israel. This is exactly how good solid hasbara works.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2019
The portrayals of Palestinian exiles in the English-language novels of Susan Abulhawa and Susan M... more The portrayals of Palestinian exiles in the English-language novels of Susan Abulhawa and Susan Muaddi Darraj present distinct imaginings of the cross-generational implications of Palestinian displacement in the US context. While Abulhawa maintains the tenor of Third World anti-colonial discourses in her writings, Darraj’s novels generate new challenging cosmopolitan dimen- sions to the Palestinian narrative. However, this encounter between the unfulfilled national voice and the language of the former colonizer is not straightforward. The instrumental roles played by the British Empire and the US in shaping the history and today’s circumstances of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict struc- ture the ways that Palestinian narratives are formulated in the English language. While these historic circumstances offer a legitimate basis for supporting the employment of the national narrative in literature, such a narrative can become increasingly insensitive to the diverse cultural and social settings that are developing among the Palestinian communitas around the globe.
Ot: אות, 2017
The purpose of my article is to configure a poetics of the Palestinian “awdah.” I have chosen lin... more The purpose of my article is to configure a poetics of the Palestinian “awdah.” I have chosen linguistically diverse memoirs by various Palestinian exiles because they similarly explore the conceptual tensions between national imaginings of “al-awdah” and their disruptive impact on virtual realizations of this desire, while simultaneously, revealing the authors’ culturally distinct experiences of exile. Their points of departure may appear identical since they share conceptions of “home” that are deeply rooted in a unified national configuration of more or less similar memories or narrations, depending on generation. However, the logic behind highlighting mutual thematic elements is based on the assumption that their journeys to the “homeland” reveal distinct diasporic experiences, representing both the ongoing cultural proliferations of the various displaced Palestinian communities and their ramifications in processes of identification. In this context, my argument both engages and diverges from the national template. The identifiable symbolic key handed down by the uprooted patriarch does not only refer to a common collective desire, but in my view, has also come to represent a token for past and current cultural diversities among Palestinians.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2017
In this article I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from putting together ... more In this article I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from putting together literary productions from the Americas, Europe and Israel by Palestinian authors and authors of Palestinian descent who may write in languages other than Arabic. Due to their daily engagement in the languages of local majorities, literature from these distinct contexts is commonly characterized by the authors' attempts at preserving cultural boundaries and exploring national identities both against the backdrop and under the influence of foreign cultural elements. I present critical readings of Anglophone, Latinate and Hebrew literary productions to facilitate my proposal for the necessity of establishing a polylingual literary category to include these texts in the national canon, and suggest a theoretical framework for reading them within both local and transnational contexts as well as alongside Palestinian literary productions composed in Arabic.
Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies, 2017
In this article, I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from pitting together... more In this article, I focus on the problems and possible consequences deriving from pitting together literary productions from the Americas, Europe, and Israel by Palestinian authors and authors of Palestinian descent who may write in languages other than Arabic. Due to their daily engagement in the languages of local majorities, literature from these distinct contexts is commonly characterized by the authors’ attempts at preserving cultural boundaries and exploring national identities both against the backdrop and under the influence of foreign cultural elements. In this section, I present critical readings of anglophone, Latinate, and Hebrew literary productions to facilitate my proposal of the necessity for establishing a polylingual literary category to include these texts in the national canon, and suggest a theoretical framework for reading them within both local and transnational contexts as well as alongside Palestinian literary productions composed in Arabic.
Comparative Literature, 2017
This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Both Susan Abul... more This article focuses on a rare leitmotif in literary productions by Palestinians. Both Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin and Sayed Kashua’s Second Person Singular present Arab characters who, under unusual circumstances, impersonate or literally acquire the identity of the Israeli-Jewish other. In the respective fictional creations of Ismael/David and Amir/Yonatan, both Abulhawa and Kashua construe characters whose existence blur the borderlines between various versions of today’s Palestinian Arab and mainstream projections of its Israeli-Jewish counterpart. These characters represent, as the article demonstrates, the authors’ attempts at working out the implications of the idea that, as a result of the historical events of the Israeli Independence and the consequent Palestinian Nakba, the collision of two national yearnings has created a liminal space in which both the Israeli and the Palestinian narratives gradually infiltrate one another, developing an inextricable and dynamic bond between the Palestinian identity and its adversarial counterpart.
E-Rea
This article employs Jacques Lacan’s concept of the sinthome to discuss the consequences of Willi... more This article employs Jacques Lacan’s concept of the sinthome to discuss the consequences of William Faulkner’s experimental employment of the stream-of-consciousness narrative mode in writing The Sound and the Fury. Faulkner effectively evacuates the authoritative narrator who may mediate, and re-envision the Compsons’ experiences from a privileged position. Instead, the composition of their experiences is held together by something else – a symptom. Psychoanalytically, the absence of a reliable narrator creates a discursive space devoid of authority, not unlike the psychotic’s reality. Composed of multiple voices in the “stream-of-consciousness” narrative mode, The Sound and the Fury’s “parallactic” narrative structure suggests a context of psychosis in which the deeply retarded Benjy Compson’s unintelligible howl functions as a symptom – or rather, I will argue, as a sinthome – a word-concept from the later Lacan which I employ here to refer to that which organizes the excess of textual jouissance in the absence of a unifying, authoritative narrator. Narration, therefore, in The Sound and the Fury does not move from the Symbolic to the Real to unveil the kernel of Benjy's cryptic enunciation as would have been expected in a neurotic context. Rather, it emerges through the invention of a sinthome.
Books by Maurice Ebileeni
Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer the... more Arabic is unconditionally the national language of Palestinians, but for many it is no longer their mother-tongue. More than a century after the early waves of immigration to the Americas, and more than seven decades after the Nakba of 48, generations of Palestinians have grown up in a variety of different contexts within Israel-Palestine and the world at large. This ongoing scattered state has led to the proliferation of Palestinian culture as it is simultaneously growing in multiple directions, depending on geographical, political, and lingual contextualization. The Palestinian story does no longer exclusively exist in Arabic. A new generation of Palestinian and Palestinian-descended writers and artists from both Latin and North America, Scandinavia and Europe at large, as well as Israel-Palestine are bringing stories of their heritage and the Palestinian nation into a variety of languages such Spanish, Italian, English, Danish, and Hebrew – among so many other languages.
Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.
Reviews:
Political, engaged with national displacement, and expressing multiple polylingual sites of production, Ebileeni's excellent book positions itself at the crossroads of these productive tensions and tells the story of expanding trajectories of literary development. This is Palestinian literary criticism at its best.
-- "Bashir Abu-Manneh, University of Kent"
Being There, Being Here is an engaged and engaging treatment of Palestinian literature in languages other than Arabic....It is bound to stir discussions and debates within the fields of Palestinian literature and cultural studies, as well as politics and history; yet also outside it.
-- "Shai Ginsburg, Duke University"
Original and provocative, Being There, Being Here is an important contribution to both comparative literature and Palestine studies. With keen insight into the historical and textual legacies of exile and diaspora, Ebileeni reminds us that being Palestinian is about much more than being in Palestine.
-- "Lital Levy, Princeton University"
Bereft of their territorialized language of the Palestinian “here” after the Nakba, Palestinian writers, whose “mother tongue” is no longer Palestinian Arabic, have found semantic refuge in Anglophone, Hebraic, Latinate, Nordic terrains, among other “there”s. A Conrad scholar, Maurice Ebileeni is reterritotializing the different literary media of Palestinian authors who--not so unlike Conrad’s shipwrecked and landless Yanko in his autobiographical “Amy Foster”--are recreating in their polylingual “minor literatures" lost and vanished worlds, far away from the shifting sands of Palestine. In addition to his meticulously attentive readings of these authors, who are “speaking in tongues” about his own personal predicament as a second-generation immigrant, Ebileeni is redrawing, in effect, the discursive boundaries of what constitutes “Palestinian literature” in the first place. If nothing else, this seems to be the singular and glowing contribution of this ingenious and path-breaking study.
-- "Anton Shammas, University of Michigan"
www.bloomsbury.com 9 0 1 0 0 9 781501 306594 Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image © Habib Khour... more www.bloomsbury.com 9 0 1 0 0 9 781501 306594 Cover design by Ben Anslow Cover image © Habib Khouri also available from Bloomsbury "Conrad, Faulkner, and the Problem of NonSense is a novel contribution to the field of literary studies, which so far has not really taken to a Lacanian approach. Introducing a new approach with clarity, the book offers its readers an original methodology to tackle a literary text that is most welcome today. What is remarkable is that Ebileeni makes his points with clarity and simplicity, while at the same time refusing to give up on a firm methodology based on state-ofthe-art theoretical considerations." -Claude Maisonnat, Emeritus Professor of Contemporary Literature, Université Lumière Lyon 2, France
Book Reviews by Maurice Ebileeni
Ariel: A Review of International English Literature, 2025
Contemporary Levant, 2024
Journal of Postcolonial Writing, 2024
Mashriq & Mahjar: Journal of Middle East and North African Migration Studies, 2023
Joseph Conrad Today, 2019
Ebileeni restates the significance of choosing Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels to demonstrate the ... more Ebileeni restates the significance of choosing Conrad’s and Faulkner’s novels to demonstrate the living situation of uncertainty at the turn of the century due to “cultural and scientific transformations” (127). The two writers’ experimental narrative techniques were a way to respond to the possibility of chaos and explore the “dimen- sions of survival” (127). The key difference between them is that Conrad adopts cynicism in thematic terms while Faulkner moves beyond that in both thematic and linguistic levels to deal with the permeating chaos. In the face of the disintegration of “an absolute, transcendental authority,” Ebileeni tersely concludes The Problem of Nonsense by maintaining that Conrad “endures” the universal chaos, while Faulkner “prevails” in the chaotic universal structure “by means of nonsense."
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Papers by Maurice Ebileeni
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Books by Maurice Ebileeni
Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.
Reviews:
Political, engaged with national displacement, and expressing multiple polylingual sites of production, Ebileeni's excellent book positions itself at the crossroads of these productive tensions and tells the story of expanding trajectories of literary development. This is Palestinian literary criticism at its best.
-- "Bashir Abu-Manneh, University of Kent"
Being There, Being Here is an engaged and engaging treatment of Palestinian literature in languages other than Arabic....It is bound to stir discussions and debates within the fields of Palestinian literature and cultural studies, as well as politics and history; yet also outside it.
-- "Shai Ginsburg, Duke University"
Original and provocative, Being There, Being Here is an important contribution to both comparative literature and Palestine studies. With keen insight into the historical and textual legacies of exile and diaspora, Ebileeni reminds us that being Palestinian is about much more than being in Palestine.
-- "Lital Levy, Princeton University"
Bereft of their territorialized language of the Palestinian “here” after the Nakba, Palestinian writers, whose “mother tongue” is no longer Palestinian Arabic, have found semantic refuge in Anglophone, Hebraic, Latinate, Nordic terrains, among other “there”s. A Conrad scholar, Maurice Ebileeni is reterritotializing the different literary media of Palestinian authors who--not so unlike Conrad’s shipwrecked and landless Yanko in his autobiographical “Amy Foster”--are recreating in their polylingual “minor literatures" lost and vanished worlds, far away from the shifting sands of Palestine. In addition to his meticulously attentive readings of these authors, who are “speaking in tongues” about his own personal predicament as a second-generation immigrant, Ebileeni is redrawing, in effect, the discursive boundaries of what constitutes “Palestinian literature” in the first place. If nothing else, this seems to be the singular and glowing contribution of this ingenious and path-breaking study.
-- "Anton Shammas, University of Michigan"
Book Reviews by Maurice Ebileeni
- See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/israel-palestine/page/2#sthash.HIogxSQ4.dpuf
Being There, Being Here is the product of an eight-year long journey in which Maurice Ebileeni explores how the Palestinian homeland is being imagined in multiple languages from a variety of positions both locally and globally. The book poses unsettling questions about this current situation and also looks to the future to speculate about how a Palestinian nation might still house the notion of home for an increasingly diverse Palestinian population.
Reviews:
Political, engaged with national displacement, and expressing multiple polylingual sites of production, Ebileeni's excellent book positions itself at the crossroads of these productive tensions and tells the story of expanding trajectories of literary development. This is Palestinian literary criticism at its best.
-- "Bashir Abu-Manneh, University of Kent"
Being There, Being Here is an engaged and engaging treatment of Palestinian literature in languages other than Arabic....It is bound to stir discussions and debates within the fields of Palestinian literature and cultural studies, as well as politics and history; yet also outside it.
-- "Shai Ginsburg, Duke University"
Original and provocative, Being There, Being Here is an important contribution to both comparative literature and Palestine studies. With keen insight into the historical and textual legacies of exile and diaspora, Ebileeni reminds us that being Palestinian is about much more than being in Palestine.
-- "Lital Levy, Princeton University"
Bereft of their territorialized language of the Palestinian “here” after the Nakba, Palestinian writers, whose “mother tongue” is no longer Palestinian Arabic, have found semantic refuge in Anglophone, Hebraic, Latinate, Nordic terrains, among other “there”s. A Conrad scholar, Maurice Ebileeni is reterritotializing the different literary media of Palestinian authors who--not so unlike Conrad’s shipwrecked and landless Yanko in his autobiographical “Amy Foster”--are recreating in their polylingual “minor literatures" lost and vanished worlds, far away from the shifting sands of Palestine. In addition to his meticulously attentive readings of these authors, who are “speaking in tongues” about his own personal predicament as a second-generation immigrant, Ebileeni is redrawing, in effect, the discursive boundaries of what constitutes “Palestinian literature” in the first place. If nothing else, this seems to be the singular and glowing contribution of this ingenious and path-breaking study.
-- "Anton Shammas, University of Michigan"