Unbounded Space: Inter-textual Palestine in Ibrāhīm Naṣrallāh's Balcony of Delirium

Ibrāhīm Naṣrallāh's (b. 1954 Amman) Shurfat al-ḥadhayān (2006, Balcony of Delirium) confronts teleological assumptions about space, nation, and the novel. A critical reading of this novel about Palestinian experience illustrates how Benedict Anderson's definition of the nation, Julia Kristeva's notion of the bounded text, and the retrospective process of historical narrative as understood by Etienne Balibar are part of what Foucault would call a dominant episteme, a set of assumptions that structures thinking about space, and reveals the outlines of this episteme. Delirium creates an innovative process of textual inter-relationship and referencing that, together, point toward an alternative structuring of space and time which makes it possible for realities of Palestinian community to be narrated