Introduction

All narratives take the reader on a journey of one kind or another, but the particular narrative journey embarked upon within this book–through a ‘postcolonial feminist’ account of Palestinian literature and film–is an attempt to chart a new discursive route into a particularly fraught territory: that of Palestinian self-representation. The necessity of undertaking such a journey emerges from the peculiar sense in which critical inquiry into Palestinian culture, particularly in the ‘Western’ academy, ² is currently subject to a number of discursive limits that, just like the roadblocks and checkpoints that regulate Palestinian territory itself, have tended to restrict the narratives that can be produced about Palestine, and the disciplines in which they can be studied. Academics and creative practitioners alike have often found themselves grappling with restrictions on what the Palestinian American critic Edward Said termed ‘permission to narrate’ when it comes to the task of formulating critical or imaginative accounts of Palestinian history, culture and identity. ³ Small wonder, then, that many scholars, even in disciplines of apparent relevance to Palestinian culture–most notably, postcolonial studies–have chosen not just to tread carefully, but often to steer well clear of such territory altogether (of which, more later). This book, though, does not seek permission to construct a single ‘acceptable’ or ‘official’ narrative of Palestinian identity. Instead, it explores the compelling yet largely unacknowledged narratives of gender-consciousness that emerge from Palestinian literature and film when approached from a postcolonial feminist perspective. In doing so, it seeks to re-narrate Palestinian culture and identity in a way that reveals its multi-layered and polyphonic qualities, and establishes new critical locations from which creative, cross-cultural, interdisciplinary dialogues might emerge. It therefore performs what the Palestinian American poet Naomi Shihab Nye describes (in the lines taken as the epigraph to this introduction) as listening to ‘the words under the words’: reading in a way that is attentive to the alternative voices, ideas and stories too often obscured from view by the reductive surface narratives of stereotype and polemic that have tended to dominate the representation of Palestine. ⁴ Why, though, should these powerful alternative narratives appear when examined from a ‘postcolonial feminist perspective’?