The Gaza Nakba: Lit Politics

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

The Israeli war on Gaza that began in 2023 marks a devastating new chapter in the ongoing Palestinian Nakba. With a scale of violence and destruction unprecedented in previous assaults on Palestinians, the war has become one of the most defining events of our time. It has ignited fierce intellectual and political debates over how to describe it, with “genocide” increasingly invoked as the most fitting paradigm. The war also raises urgent questions about its implications for academic fields such as International Law, Genocide Studies, and Postcolonial theory, as well as for thinking about anticolonial struggle and the limits of armed resistance in contexts of extreme power asymmetry. For Gazans themselves, the war has been catastrophic: entire communities shattered, thousand of lives lost, children maimed, infrastructure annihilated, and cultural heritage sites erased. Yet it has also been extensively documented from within Gaza. Writers, poets, artists, and journalists have produced searing testimonies about the war, turning Gaza into one of the most intensively self-narrated spaces of catastrophes in modern history. This course pursues two objectives. First, it will introduce students to literary and artistic responses to the war, produced by Gazans and non-Gazans alike. Through these works we will ask: What role can art and literature play in times of catastrophe? Can words adequately convey the Gaza Nakba? What are the ethical limits of representation, and who has the right to make Gaza a subject of imaginative production? Second, the course will engage key intellectual and political debates about of the war: How has it been framed? What are its potential impacts on disciplines that grapple with human suffering and mass atrocity? And how do we understand Western powers’ complicity in the destruction of Gaza? Readings will combine primary and secondary sources. Primary sources will include translated works of Palestinian writers, comics, and films. Secondary sources will include scholarly books, chapters, and essays published since 2023.