States of Mourning: Nationalism and Mourning in Palestinian and Israeli Literatures After 1948

This study explores representations of affective politics in Palestinian and Israeli literatures, using a comparative method to analyze the politics of mourning within and outside of a nation-state. The ongoing national dispute in Palestine/Israel has generated extensive loss, leading to a constant need for mourning in order to imbue death with meaning. In States of Mourning: Nationalism and Mourning in Palestinian and Israeli Literatures After 1948, I examine literary representations of dead bodies, the rhetoric of eulogies, and the trope of the mourning mother, to demonstrate the various ways that personal mourning is subsumed into affective investment in the abstract notion of the nation. Such collectivization of the personal does not occur organically, I argue; enlisting personal affect in service of the nation requires active ideological work. As my critical comparative methodology illustrates, the mechanisms of ideology operate differently in a nation-state and in conditions of statelessness, revealing the links between mourning and power. Moving between Palestinian and Israeli texts and holding them in productive tension with each other, I demonstrate the role of literature and rhetoric in this political work of mourning and the impact of statehood or lack thereof. Each of my chapters explores a different aspect of mourning. I start with the representation of dead bodies and burial in a chapter titled “Putting the Unburiable to Rest: The Politics of the Dead Body.” I analyze literary representations of corpses and the process of interring them (or not) in disputed ground, considering the place of death in politics and the political afterlife of the dead. In this first chapter, I examine the well-known Hebrew trope of the dead-living in “The Silver Platter” by Nathan Alterman and “Behold, Our Bodies Are Laid Out” by Ḥaim Gouri, in which a dead body transcends death through national symbolism. I put this trope in conversation with a Palestinian figure I term the living-dead in Maḥmoud Darwish’s Memory for Forgetfulness and Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun, and I show that the precarity of war causes the living to experience death while still alive. My second chapter, “Eulogizing Nations,” focuses on the genre of the eulogy and how it operates rhetorically and politically. The focus is on two eulogies – Moshe Dayan’s for Roi Rotberg and Maḥmoud Darwῑsh’s for Ghassān Kanafāni – in which the elegiac genre is part of articulating claims for sovereignty over the same land. In the third chapter, “Anticipating Grief: Mothers in Mourning in Kanafāni and Grossman,” I discuss the figure of the mourning mother in Ghassan Kanafāni’s Sa’ad’s Mother and David Grossman’s To the End of the Land. The mothers in these novels begin mourning their sons even before the loss has occurred as a direct result of the ongoing violence wrought by nationalism. Finally, I conclude the project with a discussion of an alternative ceremony for Memorial Day in which Palestinians and Israelis mourn alongside each other, asking what challenges mourning together might pose for national narratives. Throughout the chapters I argue that the politics of mourning are part of the foundation and solidification of nationalism, but that they operate differently within a nation-state and outside of it. My analysis is critically informed by the power differential in the region, by the complex relations between politics and aesthetics and by theories of colonialism, nationalism, and gender.PhDComparative LiteratureUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/169645/1/yaelke_1.pd