This chapter begins from a concern about the extent to which “diaspora” is one of a number of concepts that threatens to be swallowed up by the newly-dominant institutional category of “world literature,” and goes on to discuss what stands to be lost as a result, as well as how we might proceed differently. Forgetting diaspora, it argues, impoverishes our attempts to think literature in an internationalist framework; this contribution is thus an attempt to assist in the act of remembering. In particular, the chapter makes a case for reading Palestinian literature diasporically as a move toward a world literature that reads work not just “globally,” but with an eye toward internationalism.

This chapter proposes that demographic competition with Jews has been largely irrelevant to Palestinian reproductive desires and practices since 1948, a year during which they viscerally and universally recognized the importance to Zionism of the double action of “Judaizing” and “de-Arabizing” the land. The operations of Zionist demographic biopower and Palestinian resistance within Israel shift, exist as pluralities in the same time and place, and are never totalizing, as Michel Foucault would have guessed. Representing Palestinians as hyperbolically reproductive has had at least three consequences: First, it projects and magnifies onto Palestinians what are, in fact, Zionist and Western pathologies and anxieties reflected in the policies and priorities of their governments, knowledge industries, and foundations, motivated by geopolitical, ideological, and material interests. Second, it misses the range of socioeconomic, psychic, and contextual factors that have shaped Palestinian reproductive and anti-reproductive desires and practices. Third, it distorts our ability to see the emphasis on creative, political, and social struggle and regeneration in the face of social and political death in the futurities articulated after 1948. Indeed, I found death more relevant than reproduction in my analysis of Palestinian poetry, fiction, and film.