After al-Andalus / Palestine: Resistance and Collaboration in Morisco and Palestinian Literatures

Abstract

This thesis explores dichotomies of resistance and collaboration; mythmaking and testimony; and individual artistic freedom versus collective duty in the occupied contexts of Morisco and Palestinian literature. I focus on literature produced by populations who remained living in their homelands after being conquered. In both Morisco and Palestinian cases, their conquerors forged nation-states unified around a single ethnic, religious, and linguistic identity, which excluded and marginalized the conquered people who remained. This put their literatures under unusual stress, and made literature an important tool of cultural preservation and resistance. I examine works by modern Palestinian writers inside Israel from the first few decades after 1948, including Mahmoud Darwish, Tawfīq Zayyād, Samīḥ al-Qāsim, Rāshid Hussein, and Emile Habiby. I put their literature and its context into dialogue with early modern Morisco literature, including works by the Mancebo de Arévalo, Francisco Núñez Muley, Muhammad Rabadán, and Ibrahim Taybili, as well as other anonymous poems, songs, legends, and prophecies