Reading Tahrir Hamdi’s Imagining Palestine into Al-Aqsa Flood

Abstract

This interview with Tahrir Hamdi, author of Imagining Palestine: Cultures of Exile and National Identity (2023), undertakes a retrospective and prospective interrogation of the book’s central theses, considering the seismic reverberations of 7^th October 2023. It probes the conceptual architecture of Hamdi’s titular formulation, synthesising Anderson’s “imagined communities” and Hirsch’s “postmemory” to theorize the ongoing reconstitution of Palestinian national identity across the exilic, diasporic, and occupied Palestinian geographies. It traverses several interconnected axes: the metaphorics of marginality; the expressive modalities of dispossessed communities; the indispensability of the oppositional intellectual in sustaining cultures of resistance and counterhegemonic consciousness; the dialectical relationship between armed struggle and aesthetic-intellectual praxis; and the performativity of literature and art as instruments of decolonial mobilization. Hamdi’s responses critically reappraise the Palestinian Authority’s capitulation through the Oslo Accords, recuperate Fanon’s theorization of decolonial violence, and underscore the prescience of the book’s engagement with the UNRWA-right of return nexus and the instrumentalization of anti-Semitism. The interview concludes with Hamdi’s prospective vision for Palestine, asserting the dismantlement of the Zionist project and the inevitability of return and liberation. This exchange contributes to the burgeoning scholarship on Palestinian cultural production and resistance literature in contexts of ongoing settler colonialism and genocide.