Mapping the Erased: Narrative, Form, and Counter-History in Palestine – 1
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Abstract
This article analyzes Palestine – 1: Stories from the Eve of the Nakba (Comma Press, 2025) as a formally coherent counter-archive that revisits 1948 through speculative, fantastical, and non-realist narrative strategies. Conceived as a prequel to Palestine + 100, the anthology reverses futurist projection in order to confront catastrophe “from the eve” of the Nakba, moving across villages, towns, and neighborhoods whose naming operates as an ethical act of resistance to erasure. Building on debates about how extreme violence fractures time, memory, and meaning, the article argues that the collection’s non-realism—ghosts, doubles, temporal fractures, speaking landscapes—functions not as aesthetic ornament but as a necessary narrative technology for an unfinished historical condition. The anthology’s ordering is read as a “counter-map,” where geography replaces chronology and recurrence replaces linear progression, generating unity without stylistic uniformity. Situating the collection within Palestinian narrative lineages (Kanafani, Habibi, Darwish) and postcolonial critiques of imperial “imaginative geographies,” the article shows how Palestine – 1 mobilizes form to resist closure and to restore erased places to cultural memory. Ultimately, the anthology demonstrates that non-realism can operate as historical method: a way of narrating dispossession not as concluded past but as an ongoing structure organizing Palestinian time and space.