The ongoing Nakba is a historiographic framework that names the structural condition and protracted temporality of Palestinian expulsion, dispossession, and fragmentation since 1948. This talk examines ongoing Nakba as conceived in critical law scholarship, history, and artistic production to challenge the colonial contours of the international protection of persons. It then takes up two widely acclaimed works—the sci-fi digital video In the Future they Ate from the Finest Porcelain (2015) by Larissa Sansour and Søren Lind as well as the novel Minor Detail (2020 New Directions, 2017 Al-Adab) by Adania Shibli—to explore how the framework of ongoing Nakba generates aesthetic forms and methods of reading law and narrative through and beyond disaster.
Angela Naimou is an associate professor of English at Clemson University and the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham 2015), winner of the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present book prize and finalist for the William Sanders Scarborough Award by the Modern Language Association. Among her editorial projects, she is editor of the critical volume Diaspora and Literary Studies (Cambridge 2023) and co-editor of the multidisciplinary journal Humanity. At Clemson, Naimou established a refugee resettlement support and learning initiative as part of the Every Campus a Refuge network. Her current project is a co-authored short book on human rights.
This talk is presented by the IHGC's Personhoods Lab.