Refqa Abu-Remaileh, "Country of Words: A Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature" (Stanford UP, 2023)

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**Marshall Poe** (1:01)
Welcome to the New Books Network.

**Roberto Mazza** (1:05)
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Roberto Mazza, and today my guest is Professor Refqa Abu-Remaileh. She's the author of Country of Words, a Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature. This is a project that has been published in a digital format only, and it's fully and freely available at countryofwords.org, and it was published by Stanford University Press in 2023 Country of Words, a Transnational Atlas for Palestinian Literature, is a digital-born project that retraces and remaps the global story of Palestinian literature in the 20th century, starting from the Arab world and going through Europe, North America, and Latin America.
Sitting at the intersection of literary history, periodical studies, and digital humanities, Country of Words creates a digitally networked and multi-locational literary history, essentially a literary atlas enhanced. The virtual realm acts as the meeting place for the data and narrative fragments of this literature in motion, bringing together porous, interrupted, disconnected, and discontinuous fragments into an elastic, interconnected, and entangled literary history. Refqa Abu-Remaileh is a professor of modern Arabic literature and film at Freie Universität in Berlin.
But before we delve into all of this, first things first, Refqa, welcome.

**Refqa Abu-Remaileh** (2:58)
Thank you, Roberto. It's nice to be with you.

**Roberto Mazza** (3:02)
So you have an amazing project. And as I said in the introduction, first of all, this is not a traditional book, but it's a website and we repeat the link many times. And obviously, I will post the link on the podcast notes, countriesofwords.org.
But first, I want to ask you about yourself. So if you can tell us a little bit about yourself, your careers and also about the origins of this project.

**Refqa Abu-Remaileh** (3:26)
Sure.
I'm a scholar of Palestinian literature and film as a specialization of working on modern Arabic literature and film. And I would say this project was a gradual build up from my previous work. I didn't really know that I was coming to this point. But I think different pieces that I worked on, researched and wrote, led me to this publication, Country of Words.
Maybe I'll just mention a few of them, one of which was this piece that I published in the Journal of Palestine Studies called The Three Enigmas of Palestinian Literature.
And here it was my first attempt at stepping back from a literary analysis, let's say, of specific authors or periods, to start and see the bigger picture, or to try and see the bigger picture of Palestinian literature. And in this article, I posed three questions.
The questions were, who gets to write Palestinian literature? Who gets to write the Palestinian story? Is it somebody inside in Palestine or somebody in the diaspora? Or is it all these places at once? And the other question was, how do we address this silence and non-linearity that is at the heart of the story of Palestinian literature? And then the third question was that, given we were dealing with national literature without a nation state, how did we contend with issues of fragmentation and wholeness or the striving towards wholeness? So these questions really set me on a path that made me realize that the tools and methods and the ways we have studied Palestinian literature are not enough to tell us the bigger story. And that a lot of scholarship on Palestinian literature either focused on a specific author or a set of authors on a certain period, a certain geography, but never everything all at once. So then I started thinking, how can we shift things around so we can start to see Palestine and its, let's say, bigger extended geography, which includes the homeland and the diaspora. And in a piece which was published in the Journal of Arabic Literature, I started thinking about Palestinian literature in what I called the digital age of the refugee. And here I started thinking about the refugee and the exile as figures that I believed haunt Palestinian literature, that they're haunting it because they've never been acknowledged as being central to this history and because they have been there throughout this entire history. So I asked myself, what happens if we make the refugee and the exile the center of the story? How does this help us overcome or see maybe or even embrace a story that is unconventional, fragmented, scattered and extra-national that goes beyond the borders of the nation state, that goes beyond what we are normally trained in, which is usually along the lines of methodological nationalism? And I also started to think about the digital sphere. That's where it started. I was paying attention to digital projects that were coming out. And I started to think, could the digital sphere be this realm that could house and express and visualize all the different fragments of the story and to bring them together? And then a third piece I wanted to highlight, which was on this idea of the novel as contrapuntal reading. This piece focused on Elias Khoury's novel Children of the Ghetto, My Name is Adam. But actually it had wider implications on this project. I'm only realizing this now. Of course, I didn't realize it at the time. But basically, I started thinking of counterpoint and contrapuntal reading in the way that Edward Said in his book On Late Style, which I think not many people pay attention to this book because it's about music, essentially. But he establishes a very useful methodology and frame of this contrapuntal reading, which I saw as very conducive to tackling fragmented and parallel and overlapping histories. I can talk about this a little bit more later.