Space and Memory: The Poetics and Politics of Home in the Palestinian Diaspora

This dissertation attempts to conceptualize the on-the-ground memory and the spatial practices of the Palestinian Diaspora. The dissertation tries to answer the questions, how the Palestinian refugees remember their villages of origin, and how they use the space of the camp to solidify their claims on the villages of origin. The dissertation shows the camp as a memory device that reminds the refugees of their dispossession and loss while helps them pursue their everyday life. The dissertation builds on the ethnographic research that I carried out among the Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan and Lebanon in the years 2009, 2010, and 2011. The dissertation locates the memory and spatial practices in habitual and everyday life within broad socio-economic-political landscapes. While the dissertation uses the memory and spatial practices of the camps to critique the politics of subjugation that the refugees have been living, it, nevertheless, shows these practices as powerful means of meaning making and articulation in the process of the claiming of the lost self, and the decolonization of the psychic space.;This dissertation puts forward to make sense of tangled masses of hidden and tacit infrastructures of the Palestinian national life. It traces out the social infrastructures of identity and national existence through the study of the spatial and memory practices that constitute, reproduce, and expand the Palestinian national identity across the space and the time. While most approaches to the identity look into the past and have since reproduced an identity as statics artifact in the present, my work looks at more than statics and artifacts of culture. In a context in which the objects are stripped from their natural habitat, I locate them in the material and the collective embodied memory and spatial practices. In doing so, these practices emerge as milieus where the national identity is reproduced and transformed.