ABSTRACT
Diasporic space haunts the (post)colonial Palestinian imagination. Millions of Palestinians have endured conditions of displacement, refugeeism, migration and exile as a result of Palestine's traumatic colonial history, and those within the Palestinian diaspora testify to the simultaneously spatial and political dispossession of their nation. Despite the uprootings and dislocations experienced by those within the diaspora, though, diasporic space has also emerged as a site of creative energy from which many authors and filmmakers have sought both to affirm structures of belonging, and to engender new, imaginative forms of community. This final chapter therefore explores some of the ways in which creative practitioners within the diaspora have imagined forms of community according to variously feminist, anti-colonial, postcolonial, ethical and transnational identifications. While these communal identifications present vital forms of solidarity with Palestine, they may also pose a powerful potential within the transnational landscapes of inequality, injustice and communicative breakdown that have surfaced at the boundaries of ‘West’ and ‘Middle East’ in a post-September 11th environment. As such, these works draw us towards the tantalizing possibility of a distinctively transnational postcolonial feminist community.
